Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The news about the Sheffield did not reach London until later that evening. Some 12 million people were watching the BBC’s nine o’clock news when the picture cut to Whitehall, where the Ministry of Defence’s press spokesman, Ian McDonald, began reading a short, funereal statement. The Sheffield had been hit, he said, and its crew had abandoned ship. ‘It is feared that there have been a number of casualties, but we have no details of them yet. Next of kin will be informed first as soon as details are received.’ And that was it. In television terms, it could hardly have been starker or more dramatic, the effect heightened by McDonald’s extraordinarily slow, gloomy delivery. Watching in another Kentish hotel, this time with a group of middle-aged salesmen, Paul Theroux remembered another sudden silence, as their anticipation turned to horror. ‘That’ll take the wind out of our sails,’ one said at last.18

  Mrs Thatcher took the attack on the Sheffield very hard. After John Nott had confirmed the news to the Commons, she went upstairs with Willie Whitelaw to her room, and wept. On his way out, Whitelaw told her bodyguard: ‘Don’t let anyone in. She wants to be alone.’ Far from glorying in slaughter, she was well aware of the costs of war. As she told Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Anthony Parsons, it would be ‘the most awful waste of young life if we really have to go and take those islands’. And despite her steely reputation, many of her closest colleagues were struck by her emotional reaction to casualties. Ronnie Millar remembered her clenching her fists and struggling to keep back the tears, while the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, saw her bow her head to hide her emotions when bad news arrived during a War Cabinet meeting.19

  Even in public, she made no secret of it. A few weeks after the war, in an extraordinarily open interview with Woman’s Own, she recalled her feelings:

  You agonise within. Your job is to keep up morale, and the moment you go out of the door or see other people your job is to keep up the morale in spite of the tragedy. There’s no-one else to look to except your own few who are intimately with you. There are not many people you can show your innermost feelings to. You need your own family desperately. Yes, it’s very lonely.

  The interviewer asked if she sometimes reached the point of tears. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘you can’t help it. They just come. But you pull yourself together very quickly. You have to.’ She remembered being in the garden at Chequers during the war, looking around and thinking how strange it was that ordinary life went on:

  The flowers grow. The garden looks the same. Of course it does. The sun shines. You think, how can it shine? … but someone has had terrible news that day … Everything looks lovely, and yet somehow you feel you ought not to enjoy it because there are terrible things happening, and in a way it heightens the poignancy. You think of what’s happened to someone who will go out on that same morning and see those same beautiful things. And it won’t still their sad hearts because they will never see spring the same way again.

  Her predecessors might have had similar thoughts, but it is hard to imagine them sharing them with Woman’s Own.20

  Abroad, the tragedies of the Belgrano and the Sheffield stunned world opinion. To most outside observers, the conflict had always seemed a faintly comic affair. But now that hundreds of men were dead, nobody was laughing. In Washington, Paris and Bonn there were growing murmurs of disquiet. To the American diplomat Jim Rentschler, the two combatants looked like a ‘couple of staggering streetfighters, spastically-swinging at each other while blinded into fury by the flow of their own blood’. And in the days that followed, the international pressure to settle became almost overwhelming. As Sir Anthony Parsons recalled, Britain looked like a ‘horrid NATO country’, brutally clobbering a ‘poor Third World’ country.21

  The irony, therefore, is that far from torpedoing the Peruvian peace plan, the sinking of the Belgrano had put Britain in a position where it could not afford to reject it. By 4 May, even before news came through about the Sheffield, Mrs Thatcher’s government was already conceding ground. For the first time, Francis Pym told the Americans that Britain would consider a ceasefire, though he still insisted on the islanders’ right to self-determination. Within hours, however, President Reagan sent Mrs Thatcher a blunt message. Pym’s proposal was not good enough. Instead, Reagan urged her to accept Peru’s deal, which was essentially the latest version of Haig’s old plan. Both sides would withdraw their forces, while for the next year the Falklands would be run by a ‘contact group’, consisting of the United States, West Germany, Brazil and Peru, until Britain and Argentina concluded a sovereignty agreement. Crucially, there was nothing about the self-determination of the islanders. Instead, the plan promised only to take into account their ‘aspirations and interests’, which was meaningless. Almost certainly it would end with Argentine sovereignty over the Falklands.22

  The next morning, Mrs Thatcher called an emergency Cabinet to discuss the Peruvian plan. Some ministers thought the loss of the Sheffield meant Britain had no choice but to accept. Willie Whitelaw warned that if they turned it down they would ‘lose’ the Americans. Others were more hawkish. Norman Fowler believed Britain would be ‘giving up a great deal, e.g. on self-determination’, while Michael Heseltine said they would be ‘abandoning the things we set out to achieve’. But the key voice belonged to Mrs Thatcher – who, perhaps surprisingly, said they had to take it. She recognized that it was a compromise, and that they were giving up the principle of self-determination. But she also knew she could not afford to alienate the Americans. If Britain rejected the plan, recorded the minutes, ‘she would be severely criticised by international opinion, which was already moving against her’.fn3 So they had to go for it.23

  For Mrs Thatcher, this was an immensely difficult moment. In effect, she had persuaded her own colleagues to do the one thing she had always set her face against: compromise on the core principle of the islanders’ self-determination. The explanation is no mystery: in the aftermath of the Belgrano and the Sheffield, the pressure from her allies left her no choice. But there is no doubt that she found it stressful, even traumatic. Immediately afterwards she scribbled an extraordinarily emotional plea to Reagan, imploring him to see that the Falkland Islanders, who had lived under ‘liberty and a just law’, were being betrayed. It seemed terrible, she wrote, that she was expected to abandon these ‘fundamental democratic principles’, something she would have thought ‘impossible while you are at the White House’. Tellingly, though, she never sent it. Instead, she sent a much more anodyne version, suggesting only cosmetic tweaks to the deal. ‘In a word, Maggie accepts,’ scribbled one of Reagan’s White House confidants.24

  And then, with stunning predictability, the Argentines let her off the hook. Only hours later, General Galtieri told his Peruvian counterpart that the plan was no good. ‘They believe that time is on their side, that Britain’s diplomatic support will dwindle and that with the onset of winter in the South Atlantic and possibly the sinking of another ship, we will buckle,’ recorded Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain’s ambassador in Washington. But of course there was another factor, too. For Mrs Thatcher, a deal might have caused difficulties with the Sun, but it would not necessarily have been terminal. For the junta, however, withdrawal from Stanley would have been impossible to sell to the Buenos Aires crowds. In effect, they were trapped by their own nationalist rhetoric. Mrs Thatcher could hardly have wished for more maladroit opponents.25

  Far beyond the South Atlantic, the loss of the Sheffield had come as a terrible shock. The collective shudder, wrote Sir Henry Leach, was almost tangible. For many people, ‘this was the first real comprehension that the country was at war’. In the Commons, recalled Julian Critchley, it was a ‘terrible night’. After South Georgia, many Tory MPs had been giddy with patriotic excitement; now they realized that this great adventure ‘might end badly – not just for the Tory Party, but for the nation and for everyone involved in the task force’. The next day’s Sun replaced its political cartoon with a blank space, explaining that i
t was ‘now considered inappropriate’, while the Mirror redoubled its appeals for peace, insisting that ‘the killing has got to stop’. In the New Statesman, Peter Kellner proclaimed that the war was ‘turning into a worse fiasco than Suez’.26

  Nicholas Garland’s cartoon for the Daily Telegraph (6 May 1982) is a masterpiece of its kind, at once compassionate, learned and patriotic. He was one of the only cartoonists to mourn the Belgrano and the Sheffield in the same image.

  In Newton Abbot, Mary Richards told Mass Observation that the loss of the Sheffield had made her feel physically sick. It brought back memories of the Second World War: the air raids, when she was so frightened she could barely breathe; or her father’s long absences working on the railways, when they were worried that the Luftwaffe had got him. And in Darlington, Susan Gray recorded that she and her husband had heard the news just after they had got back from their folk-dance display practice and were having supper with her father. ‘At the end of the bulletin’, she wrote, ‘none of us knew what to say.’ He father had been on a ship attacked by Japanese warplanes during the Second World War. Now he sat in silence, aghast. But a few days later, her brother told her that among his workmates the reaction was unanimous: ‘We go in now.’27

  In some ways it is remarkable that the public reaction to the loss of the Sheffield was so muted. Almost certainly things would have been different if there had been television pictures. But from start to finish, the Ministry of Defence managed the media with ruthless efficiency. Initially, remembering the American ordeal in Vietnam, they had wanted to forbid any reporters from travelling at all, and had only reluctantly allowed a handful to leave with the Task Force. Those who did were so deeply embedded, digging their own trenches, cooking their own rations, helping to carry military equipment and generally mucking in, that they sometimes seemed more like fans with typewriters. Indeed, by far the best known of the Falklands correspondents, the Evening Standard’s Max Hastings, openly told his readers that he was there to ‘report as sympathetically as possible what the British forces are doing’. Having watched ‘British ships burn to the waterline while British sailors fought to escape with their lives’, he had no intention of letting the side down. ‘Like the humblest marine, like most of my colleagues,’ he wrote, ‘I am impelled through the day by a brutish determination to see the Argentines driven from the Falklands.’28

  The real contrast with Vietnam was the absence of television. The American experience, when the networks had beamed raw, visceral footage into people’s living rooms for night after night, had taught the Ministry of Defence a potent lesson. As a result, the Falklands was, in Robert Harris’s words, the ‘worst reported war since the Crimea’. Since it took three weeks for film to get back to London anyway, there were no television images at all for the first fifty-four days. That meant the BBC and ITN had to rely on stills, artists’ impressions, stock footage and even toy models. The first television pictures of the stricken Sheffield were not broadcast until 26 May, three weeks after the attack. And as Harris points out, one thing, above all, was completely missing from the television version of the Falklands War. There were no dead bodies; indeed, there were not even any still photographs of bodies. Hundreds of people died, but there was no blood.

  Instead, the defining television image of the war was the face of Ian McDonald, the Ministry of Defence’s lugubrious press officer, who delivered his reports so slowly and expressionlessly that the press called him ‘McDalek’. Private Eye’s editor, Richard Ingrams, thought McDonald sounded like an ‘especially gloomy dean reading the second lesson at Evensong in a huge and draughty cathedral’. The Mirror’s Keith Waterhouse, more tartly, thought he was ‘the only man in the world who speaks in Braille’. But clearly some people liked him, since he received several proposals of marriage. One woman became so obsessed that she used to wait for him outside the Ministry of Defence. In the end, McDonald had to complain to the building’s security men.29

  Yet public attitudes to the war were never straightforward. Paul Theroux thought that while British newspapers were astonishingly jingoistic, the British people were not. Whenever television bulletins brought fresh news, most people reacted with ‘great bewilderment’. They did not hate the Argentines, but regarded them as ‘pathetic, ramshackle and unlucky, with a conscript army of very young boys’. And some disagreed with the whole business. In a pub in Bognor, one Mrs Hykeham, with ‘an old scarf yanked on her head and puffy, smoker’s eyes’, started a great row at the bar by declaring that it was ‘stupid for Britain to be killing fourteen-year-old boys’. And in Newton Abbot, Mary Richards got into an argument in the newsagents with ‘another working-class woman’, who attacked her for being unpatriotic because she did not want to see fighting. This was typical, Mary lamented. Nobody in Newton Abbot wanted to discuss the war, because ‘if a word against it is said you will be accused of being unpatriotic’.30

  Even inside the Task Force there were at least some who considered the entire operation misguided. The best known was the 25-year-old naval lieutenant David Tinker, who served on HMS Glamorgan and was killed during the battle for Stanley. Afterwards, his father Hugh, an eminent historian, published his letters and poems, which were then reprinted in the Sunday Times. Lieutenant Tinker had never approved of the war, which he thought ‘barbaric and unnecessary’, and was appalled by the press coverage. ‘The newspapers all seem to be screaming “War, War”,’ he wrote home from the Glamorgan:

  It must be the same on TV and radio. They give the impression that the whole of Britain is under attack … From the way Maggie Thatcher has reacted one would imagine that the Russians were already in Bonn: not that we were fighting for a rocky island which Mr Nott had planned to keep completely undefended from mid-April.31

  Yet Tinker was in a minority. Even after the loss of the Sheffield, polls consistently found that most people backed sending the Task Force, believed the islands should be returned to Britain and would support a land war if necessary. ‘The Falklands look like bloody Bodmin Moor, but I suppose we have to do something,’ one man told Theroux in a Cornish bed-and-breakfast. ‘We have to do it,’ said a man on the train at Bristol. ‘Our land’s been taken. The Argies have to be stopped. They can’t get away with it. That’s how Hitler got started!’ And in Blackpool, Theroux met Mr Gummer, fishing on the pier, who thought Britain ought to flatten Buenos Aires immediately. ‘After all, the Argies had captured a British sheep station. Those bloody bean-eaters had to be taught a lesson.’ Mr Gummer said he had been a socialist all his life, ‘but he had a lot of respect for the prime minister. She had guts, and he agreed that it was a good idea to call the British troops “our boys”.’32

  ‘Our boys.’ That was what Mrs Thatcher called them, while the Sun marketed itself as ‘the newspaper that supports our boys’. But to some people, those words sounded mawkish, jingoistic and plain wrong. Early in the conflict, the BBC’s Brian Hanrahan had made a passing reference to ‘our forces’, which worried his editors. The radio news editor put up a notice reminding people to say ‘British forces’ instead, in order to avoid giving the ‘impression that we are taking verbal sides’. ‘NOT OUR TROOPS’, began another note circulated in the news department. ‘We should try to avoid using “our” when we mean British. We are not Britain, we are the BBC.’33

  Clearly this was a tricky issue. As BBC executives saw it, the audience expected them to report the truth as objectively as possible. On the other hand, many viewers also expected them to reflect the nation, especially when Britain was at war. The BBC could not be expected to take their cue from the Sun, but many people felt that the words ‘British Broadcasting Corporation’ ought to mean something. The most controversial example came on Sunday 2 May, the day the Belgrano was sunk, when Newsnight’s presenter Peter Snow was discussing rival claims about what was happening in the South Atlantic. ‘We cannot demonstrate that the British have lied to us so far,’ he said, ‘but the Argentinians clearly have. Until the British are demonstrated either t
o be deceiving us or to be concealing losses from us, we can only tend to give a lot more credence to their version of events.’34

  To some viewers this was disgraceful. The fact that Snow had endorsed the British version was beside the point; what incensed them was his language (‘lied’, ‘deceiving’), as well as the implication that the BBC saw itself as the arbiter between two potentially disingenuous combatants. Snow’s words were ‘totally offensive and almost treasonable’, declared one Tory MP. Private Eye’s Denis Thatcher tells his friend Bill that he had been warning of the ‘closet Marxists at the BBC’ for years: ‘If ever there was a state owned industry ripe for privatisation,’ he remarks, ‘it is that nest of Pinkoes and Traitors at Shepherd’s Bush.’ And in a case of life imitating art, the real Denis thought much the same. Later, he told his daughter that he had been ‘livid with rage’ that the ‘bloody BBC [could] question the integrity of the military’, and had ‘hated them since that day’.35

  Then, two days later, came the loss of the Sheffield. And with feelings running higher than ever, the BBC found itself cast as the enemy within. Invited to condemn the national broadcaster on 6 May, Mrs Thatcher agreed that when presenters talked of ‘the Argentines’ and ‘the British’, it ‘gives offence and causes great emotion among many people’. Among her backbenchers, Winston Churchill, Britain’s leading professional grandson, accused the BBC of peddling ‘live propaganda out of Buenos Aires’, while Robert Adley called it ‘General Galtieri’s fifth column in Britain’. The next day, the 7th, the Sun charged into battle. ‘There are traitors in our midst,’ began a long editorial: