The Falklands War: 40 years on
7 min read
The sight of a packed Commons Chamber uniting to condemn the attack on Ukraine by an autocratic aggressor stirred memories of the parliamentary outrage 40 years ago when the House came together to vow an unprovoked invasion of British territory would be repulsed, by force if necessary, as Robert Orchard reports.
It was, by common accord, a national humiliation – the worst British military reverse since Suez. The Conservative government had been caught napping by a tinpot dictator, a “bargain basement Mussolini,” in the memorable words of one MP.
Under cover of darkness, Argentinian forces had taken control of a British colony on the edge of Antarctica and occupied the capital. It was Friday 2 April 1982 and the Falklands conflict had begun, a fortnight after a motley band of scrap-metal merchants had first raised the Argentine flag on desolate South Georgia.
The Commons was hastily summoned for an historic emergency debate the next day, the first Saturday sitting since the Suez fiasco a generation earlier. The mood described by political commentator Hugo Young in his book, One Of Us, was “of bulldog outrage… an occasion of terrifying but irresistible power” as Tory MPs “snarled and fumed” their way through the debate. The prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, would later describe learning of the Argentine invasion as the worst moment of her life.
As Lord Moore, now a non-affiliated peer, wrote in his official biography of Thatcher: “The humiliation of Britain was sudden, and complete. Unless it could be reversed, Mrs Thatcher could not expect to survive as prime minister.”
Argentina had long claimed the Falklands – or Malvinas – for itself, and the patience of General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta with Britain, and the 1,800 Falkland Islanders who were determined to retain their British sovereignty despite being 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom, had run out.
Sir Peter Riddell was in the Press Gallery as political editor for the Financial Times as MPs gathered. “We were in a kind of shellshock,” he tells The House. “The Commons was packed and there was a lot of Tory backbench anger at the government, though also a sense of curious unreality about it all.”
Thatcher insisted the invasion could not have been foreseen or prevented, and was able to quell at least some of the anger and shore up her own position by announcing that a large naval taskforce was being prepared and would sail within days.
The Labour leader, Michael Foot, responded in what Riddell calls his “1939 – we are fighting fascism” mode, and strongly backed the taskforce – but had serious questions about how the situation had come to pass, accusing the government of betraying the islanders.
For now, though, Foot’s priority was, he told the Chamber, “to ensure that foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in our world. If it does, there will be a danger not merely to the Falkland Islands, but to people all over this dangerous planet”.
A storm of denunciation rained down on government ministers, including from several MPs who had fought in the last world war, with perhaps the most vicious attacks emanating from the Tory benches.
Edward du Cann, who chaired the backbench 1922 Committee, said he found it “astonishing” the government was so woefully ill-prepared for the invasion. Julian Amery insisted: “We must wipe the stain from Britain’s honour.” And Patrick – now Lord – Cormack quoted Tennyson to thunder that “someone had blundered”.
But it was the former Conservative minister Enoch Powell, by now an Ulster Unionist, who threw down the gauntlet to the prime minister. She had been dubbed “The Iron Lady,” he recalled, for her robust remarks about the Soviet Union, a title in which he suggested she took some pride: “In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right honourable lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.”
The former Labour foreign secretary, David, now Lord, Owen – by then a leading member of the breakaway SDP – weighed in, reminding the Commons how he and the former Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, had reacted to previous sabre-rattling by the Argentinians only a few years before, in 1977.
“It was possible to deploy a naval force and… to use it in negotiations with the Argentines, knowing full well that we had behind us a naval force and the capacity to stop invasion.” Why hadn’t Mrs Thatcher done the same, he demanded?
Only two MPs dared voice any serious doubts about sending the taskforce. One of them, the Conservative former diplomat Ray Whitney, had worked for three years in Argentina and called for efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement: “Are we ready as a nation… to accept the military implications of what is involved in a landing on the islands? If we are, well and good, but are we ready to maintain that effort not for a week, not for a month, but for years?” He was dismissed as a defeatist for his pains.
The debate ended in virtual uproar after an ill-judged winding-up by the defence secretary, John Nott, who by the end struggled to make himself heard amid calls of “Resign! Resign!” Riddell says that Saturday Commons debate was cathartic, upping the stakes by endorsing military action almost unanimously.
Scarred by the venom of Tory protests, the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, resigned two days later, along with his ministerial team. Nott tendered his resignation too, but Thatcher insisted he stay on.
The course of the 11-week conflict is well chronicled – but what memories linger for those still in Parliament who lived through those turbulent times?
The former Conservative minister Michael, now Lord, Heseltine, recalls the Cabinet meeting where the prime minister asked every member in turn for their views on sending the taskforce. Only one, trade secretary John Biffen, opposed the plan.
“I said that if the fleet does not sail, this government will fall. Margaret had no option but to send the taskforce,” Heseltine remembers.
Owen, now an Independent Social Democrat peer, pinpoints what he calls a crucial error in the government’s preparations: when Admiral Henry Leach, as First Sea Lord and chief of naval staff, persuaded Thatcher that a taskforce could be quickly assembled and should sail, he told her it would take three weeks to reach the Falklands. “Three weeks?” exclaimed the prime minister, according to Leach’s later recollection. “Surely you mean three days?”
Owen says: “Mrs Thatcher thought it was a matter of a few days to sail to the Falklands! It is an astonishing factor that has never been given enough publicity. It showed that the Foreign Office had not alarmed her enough about the situation in the Falklands. The Foreign Office was asleep and Lord Carrington’s resignation was absolutely essential.”
Neil Kinnock, now a Labour peer, would replace Foot as Labour leader after the 1983 election loss – a heavier defeat due to nationalist fervour for Thatcher after the Falklands victory but a result where Foot’s faltering leadership of Labour and a badly-split opposition also played a part. Kinnock believes Thatcher acted with force and determination during the Falklands conflict – but was lucky, too.
“The Argentine leader, General Galtieri, was an utterly incompetent authoritarian, so filled with his own egotistical self-regard that he could not comprehend the willingness of a British government to use force in the South Atlantic. Mrs Thatcher was lucky, too, that the Argentinian force, mainly conscripts, was willing to surrender when morale collapsed. Napoleon said, ‘Give me lucky generals’, and she was a lucky prime minister!”
With a high rate of loss – 255 British service personnel died – Riddell agrees victory was a close-run thing: “If one of our aircraft carriers had been sunk, which was perfectly possible, that might have brought Mrs Thatcher down.”
He offers this assessment of the political effects of winning the Falklands conflict: “It reinforced Mrs Thatcher’s standing and her reputation… after a pretty rough period. The upside was to reinforce her confidence and strength of leadership and made her more determined to press on.”
As for what Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands did to the burgeoning SDP-Liberal Alliance, Owen has no doubts: “It finished us off. She had been an extremely unpopular prime minister up until this point... pursuing very hard policies on public spending. But the British people were not going to reject someone who had won a great victory, and a victory they felt they had participated in.
“Overall, she was a winner – and politics likes a winner.”
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