Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (116 page)

Although a close political ally of Mrs Thatcher’s on economic matters (the only such ally in her Foreign Office team), Ridley had a lack of affection for British overseas possessions quite at odds with her own attitudes. He also had a dangerously flip turn of phrase. The record of his talks in
New York with Commodore Cavandoli, his Argentine opposite number, shows Ridley in best dismissive vein: ‘We had given up a third of the world’s surface and found it on the whole beneficial to do so. The only claim Britain had which he felt strongly about was our long-standing claim to Bordeaux, his motive being wine. He found it hard to see the motive towards the islands where there was no wine.’
⁵
At secret talks between Ridley and Cavandoli near Geneva in August, the principle of leaseback, with ninety-nine years as the probable extent of the lease, was hypothetically agreed.

At a meeting of OD on 7 November 1980, Mrs Thatcher expressed her doubts. ‘This would be very difficult: surrender of sovereignty,’ Robert Armstrong noted her saying.
⁶
According to her own memory, she reacted angrily to Ridley’s claim that Britain could not defend the Falklands: ‘We could bomb Buenos Aires if nothing else.’ ‘It was just an instinctive reaction,’ she added. ‘It was not recorded.’
⁷
What
was
recorded, by Armstrong, was her view that ‘We can’t afford to defend them. We are yielding to threats.’ Carrington said that leaseback was the ‘only idea that has any future’. Mrs Thatcher urged Ridley to work on backbenchers, and said: ‘Our fallback is that we do nothing without consent of the islanders.’

This consent was not forthcoming. Towards the end of November, Ridley visited the islands, talking to as many of the inhabitants as he could. In one public meeting, an islander said: ‘I don’t think we should give them sovereignty. We’re giving up our birthright.’ To this Ridley replied, ‘Well then you take the consequences [of not giving up sovereignty], not me.’
⁸
Although he added that Britain would defend the islands from Argentine attack, the phrase about taking the consequences was not a happy one. It stuck in the islanders’ minds. He left the islands without carrying his point, though without a formal rejection of his proposals. On 2 December 1980, he made a statement to Parliament in which, as Mrs Thatcher had originally predicted, the idea of leaseback was fiercely attacked by MPs on all sides for betraying the Falklanders. At OD a month earlier, Mrs Thatcher had repeated her anxiety: ‘My fear is an awful row from our backbenchers.’
⁹
She had been proved right.

Meeting the day after the ‘awful row’, ministers in OD cogitated inconclusively. Referring to the exclusion of Falklanders from the automatic right to emigrate to Britain under the forthcoming British Nationality Act, Mrs Thatcher mused: ‘We shall have to give an undertaking that they should come here.’
¹⁰
But this was not followed through, because of the precedent it would set for all other citizens of British Dependent Territories (as colonies were now formally known). On 7 January 1981, the Falklands Councillors – the islands’ elected representatives – gave a hostile view of leaseback and
advocated a freeze to the sovereignty dispute. The Foreign Office did not attempt to develop a new policy to give some positive effect to the islanders’ wishes, but treated them with borderline contempt. The islanders were ‘simple people and they clung to simple ideas’, declared Sir Michael Palliser that June.
¹¹
If they would not agree to put leaseback on the table, the Foreign Office felt that negotiations would prove futile. The result was impasse, and rising Argentine impatience. In July 1981, in what turned out to be its last assessment of the problem before the crisis of the following March, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC),
*
while not predicting the worst, did say that if Argentina came to believe that it would not get a peaceful transfer of sovereignty ‘a full-scale invasion cannot be discounted.’
¹²

This uneasy situation coincided with the pressures on public spending at home. Exasperated by the resistance of the Defence Secretary, Francis Pym, to her demands for economies, Mrs Thatcher had moved him to Leader of the House at the beginning of January. The task of Pym’s successor, John Nott, was to cut. And because Britain had made promises to NATO about increasing its alliance commitment, cuts could not come in Europe but had to be found elsewhere in the defence budget. Nott advanced the idea that surface ships were no longer as necessary to the navy as in the past. At an OD Committee to discuss the matter, the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Edwin Bramall,
^†
recalled Mrs Thatcher asking Carrington his opinion of this new doctrine. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,’ said the Foreign Secretary, ‘but the Defence Secretary has no other option because we’d never get the cuts through NATO.’
¹³
Because non-NATO cuts were easier to make in the navy than in the other services, this is what happened. The resistance from Admiral Sir Henry Leach,
^‡
the Chief of the Naval Staff, was so fierce that it may even have been counter-productive. According to David Omand,
^§
Nott’s private secretary, the navy failed to make a ‘modern case’ for its surface ships, falling back on ‘Atlantic convoy stuff’, but was, in essence, in the right: the internal battle was
so intense that ‘We’d taken our eye off the ball about what defence forces were really there for.’
¹⁴

One of the victims of this process was the ice patrol ship HMS
Endurance
, the only Royal Navy vessel regularly in service in the South Atlantic. Its withdrawal, following the 1981–2 season, was announced in June 1981. The Foreign Office objected, because of the signals withdrawal would send to Argentina, but did not press its case to the utterance. Mrs Thatcher herself was not convinced of the importance of
Endurance
. As late as early March 1982, she chatted about the issue to Richard Luce,
*
who by then had replaced Nicholas Ridley at the Foreign Office. When Luce tried to tell her that
Endurance
mattered, ‘She said that
Endurance
was no good; it just went “pop, pop, pop”.’
¹⁵

So Britain had failed to get a deal with Argentina, and failed to pursue the alternative of much stronger support for the regeneration of the Falklands. By sentencing
Endurance
to death, it had signalled a lack of will to defend the islands. As Rex Hunt, the Governor of the Falklands, noted in his annual review of 1981, ‘by the end of the year even our most loyal friends were beginning to doubt the good faith of HMG.’
¹⁶
He expected the next set of talks with Argentina to break down and recommended ‘contingency plans now’ in case this happened.

Early in December 1981 a new junta grabbed power in Argentina, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, the commander of the army. It quickly decided that a resolution of the Malvinas question was the priority for 1982. In mid-January, a secret National Strategy Directive was circulated, stating that the Military Committee had ‘resolved to analyse the possibility of the use of military power to obtain the political objective’.
¹⁷
None of this reached British intelligence, nor was it relayed diplomatically. Richard Luce later wrote that Anthony Williams, the British Ambassador in Buenos Aires, ‘never gave me any impression of a sense of urgency about the new Government’s attitude to the Falklands’.
¹⁸
Britain, represented by Luce, went forward to talks with Argentina in New York at the end of February. Though not agreeing anything of substance, these talks seemed to set up a process which would go forward. The joint communiqué spoke of ‘a cordial and positive spirit’.

On 3 March, however, the news appeared in the British press that Argentina had refused to publish the joint communiqué. Instead, the junta forced
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to put out a unilateral statement. This revealed the content of the New York discussions, although they had been confidential, and insisted that British recognition of Argentine sovereignty must be made within a period which ‘will necessarily have to be short’. If this did not happen, Argentina would ‘choose freely the procedure which best accords with her interests’.
¹⁹
At the same time, bellicose articles began to appear in the Argentine press, calling for direct military action in a few months’ time, if Britain did not agree. On Williams’s report from Buenos Aires about the threatening communiqué, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘We must make contingency plans.’ As Sir Lawrence Freedman puts it in his official history of the Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher’s request ‘does not appear to have reached any part of the intelligence community’.
²⁰

The prevailing view remained that Argentina would not actually attack the Falklands. The Reagan administration in Washington had established better relations with Argentina – a fact which itself emboldened the junta. Thomas Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, had been visiting Buenos Aires on the day the junta had issued its aggressive communiqué on the New York talks. His telegram back to Washington suggested that the statement ‘may have been no more than to satisfy domestic public opinion, but we cannot be certain. Clearly, a resolution of this ancient dispute is as far off as ever and the local jingos are speculating again about an armed Argentine landing in the islands.’
²¹
But on 12 March Enders told the British that in his view Argentina was not contemplating ‘anything drastic’.
²²
*
On 19 March, Ambassador Williams wrote to Luce dismissing the idea of the use of force by Argentina: ‘we know the current team to be much too intelligent to do anything so silly.’ As soon as they received the letter, however, the Foreign Office wrote on it, ‘overtaken by events’.
²³
These events soon prompted Argentina’s ‘current team’ to do something very silly indeed.

On 18 March 1982, Argentine scrap metal dealers had landed on the British dependency of South Georgia, which was governed from the Falklands
Islands. They were fulfilling a legitimate contract which originated with a British company, but they did not have permission to land, and they were taken to South Georgia by the Argentine navy. Once landed, they damaged and robbed property of the British Antarctic Survey and ran up the Argentine flag. Rex Hunt, the Governor, ordered them to leave. On 21 March the condemned but still functioning
Endurance
was despatched from the Falklands to make for South Georgia, with the strong agreement of Mrs Thatcher. The Foreign Office now tied itself in knots. Would the arrival of
Endurance
in South Georgia only make Argentina more intransigent? Was Britain wise to adopt a high tone when it was not in a position to enforce its will? Back home, the House of Commons sought answers. A statement by Richard Luce, promising ‘firm action’, was not really believed. The numerous Tory backbenchers who felt strongly on the subject were suspicious, not only of the Foreign Office, but even of Mrs Thatcher. When Alan Clark, discussing the situation with colleagues, suggested that Mrs Thatcher would surely sympathize with those, including himself, who ‘think Imperially’, Nick Budgen replied: ‘Don’t bet on that, Alan. She is governed only by what the Americans want. At heart she is just a vulgar, middle-class Reaganite.’
²⁴

There is no evidence that Argentina had contrived the original incident, but it certainly took advantage of it. On 23 March, the day of Luce’s statement to the Commons, the junta decided to send Marines to Leith in South Georgia. These landed on the night of 24 March. On the same day, the junta secretly brought forward its plans for the invasion of the Falkland Islands. Two days later – again, of course, secretly – it ordered the invasion to proceed. Poor Ambassador Williams in Buenos Aires, uneasily conscious that he was being kept in the dark, wailed to the Foreign Office about the Argentine Foreign Minister, ‘I have the growing impression that Costa Mendez has been less than honest with me.’
²⁵

On 25 March, the Cabinet discussed the matter unproductively. Carrington told his colleagues that the situation was ‘escalating into something which may be very difficult politically and diplomatically’.
²⁶
Mrs Thatcher said that she simply did not know what
Endurance
could do. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, pressed for robust action: ‘We said we’re going to remove them.’ But Carrington shied away: ‘No – that they must go.’ An Argentine invasion of the Falklands was discussed. The Cabinet minutes record the conclusion that ‘if the Argentines thereafter threatened military action, Britain would face an almost impossible task in seeking to defend the Islands at such long range.’
²⁷
The scrapping of
Endurance
‘might now need to be reconsidered’. But even now the government machine and No. 10 itself were not geared to a full-blown crisis. On the same day,
Richard Luce interceded with No. 10 to make an announcement that
Endurance
would be retained, but Clive Whitmore told him to plead his case with defence ministers, not with the Prime Minister.
²⁸
The next day, the Ministry of Defence presented Mrs Thatcher with some hastily prepared contingency plans. Deterring any Argentine aggression, the Prime Minister was informed, would require a substantial Royal Navy flotilla, led by either
Hermes
or
Invincible
. Once it had arrived in the South Atlantic, the experts judged this force would be sufficient to ward off any invasion, but ‘if faced with Argentine occupation on arrival there would be no certainty that such a force would be able to
retake
the dependency’. ‘You can imagine that turned a knife in my heart,’ Mrs Thatcher later recalled.
²⁹
Her great concern was that to take such action would provoke the very thing that she was trying to forestall, i.e. an invasion. If this took place before the flotilla arrived, it would not be possible to undo it. ‘That would have been the greatest humiliation for Britain,’ Mrs Thatcher concluded.
³⁰
She duly rejected the plan. On 29 March, Carrington and Mrs Thatcher flew to Brussels together for an EEC summit, and discussed the situation on the plane. Instead of a flotilla, they agreed to send a submarine
*
to the South Atlantic and order a second to be prepared. But despite the crisis, and the fact that Carrington had already written to the US Secretary of State, Al Haig, asking him to intercede with Argentina, they agreed that Carrington’s planned visit to Israel should go ahead. According to John Coles, who travelled with Mrs Thatcher that day as her overseas private secretary, there was as yet no belief in her mind or that of Carrington that Argentina was about to invade.
³¹