Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (126 page)

Cecil Parkinson said he would go on lunchtime television to explain that casualties were necessary in war, but Mrs Thatcher said, ‘No no, they’ll never
believe a politician, CDS must do it.’ So I was sent out to Northwood on what was ostensibly a routine visit to discuss matters with John Fieldhouse. We emerged from the headquarters to be surrounded by television reporters and I said my little piece. It was the only time during the Falklands that I appeared on TV.
⁵⁸

*

The crisis had progressed, noted the CIA, from its ‘comic opera’ stage into the grim business of killing’.
⁵⁹
This led Washington to plumb new depths of desperation. Mrs Thatcher soon found herself under the greatest American pressure of the entire conflict as the so-called Peruvian Plan came to the fore. ‘Will they all now give peace a chance?’ wrote Ronald Reagan privately.
⁶⁰
In his diary Jim Rentschler recorded the perspective from the NSC in graphic terms:

The stance of these two disputants increasingly resembles that of a couple of staggering streetfighters, spastically-swinging at each other while blinded into fury by the flow of their own blood. Alarmed by the mounting ferocity, my Latin American counterpart Roger Fontaine and I co-author a quick memo for [Judge William] Clark … ‘The sinkings of the
Belgrano
and the
Sheffield
bring the South Atlantic conflict to an alarmingly new and perhaps desperate stage, one which throws into sharper relief the negative strategic factors which the US will increasingly confront as the hostilities persist …’
⁶¹

The memo proposed that Britain should now ‘declare victory on the military level’, and the US should launch a new peace initiative via the OAS. ‘Now that we have come down on the British side,’ the Rentschler–Fontaine memo continued, ‘our leverage with Mrs Thatcher is greatly increased; we are a de facto partner in the enterprise and can use that position to push our own interests in ways denied to us in our previous “honest broker” role.’
⁶²

Haig pushed as hard as he could. He wrote almost desperately to Francis Pym, who had listed British sticking points with the Peruvian Plan that Haig had outlined to him in Washington: ‘I must tell you with a candour possible only between closest allies that the ideas you have conveyed can lead only to one outcome: Argentine rejection …’
⁶³
But, as the US Embassy in London recognized, Pym was not the pivotal player. A cable sent back to Washington on 4 May reported that a ‘well-informed FCO source’ had told Embassy officials that ‘the FCO is more than conscious of the pitfalls of winning military battles and losing political wars, and sensitive as well to a shift in allied opinion in recent days. The problem now, he said, was to convince Thatcher.’
⁶⁴

In light of all this, President Reagan was persuaded that it was time for him to intervene personally with Mrs Thatcher. Rather than using the telephone, where her greater grasp of detail tended to put him at a disadvantage, he approved the following letter:

Dear Margaret

The decisions I made last Friday [the tilt] were aimed at putting you in the strongest possible position to achieve a peaceful settlement in line with the basic principles and values to which we are both committed. I believe there is now a chance to realize that aim, and that we must seize it before more lives are lost.

Reiterating that Pym’s answers to Haig’s ‘formulations’ would not work with Buenos Aires, Reagan went on:

I urge you to agree to have these ideas proposed by us and Peru as soon as possible, recognizing that it will be difficult to get Peruvian agreement to join us in this initiative and more difficult still to gain Argentine acceptance. This, I am convinced, is now our best hope.

Sincerely,

Ron
⁶⁵

Mrs Thatcher summoned an emergency meeting of the full Cabinet, the first such since 2 April, for the morning of 5 May. She circulated the US–Peruvian proposals to colleagues. Pym gave the Cabinet his view that Argentina probably would not accept but it ‘would be acceptable to us’ if it did. He admitted that there was ‘an area of controversy’ about the nature of the local administration permitted under the plan: ‘I acknowledge it’s a fudge.’
⁶⁶
Ministers then began a long debate. Nigel Lawson feared that, once enmeshed in talks, Britain would find it difficult to break them off and start fighting again. Patrick Jenkin, on the other hand, said that ‘what happened yesterday’ (the sinking of
Sheffield
) meant that Britain had to offer a ceasefire. Several others disagreed. Keith Joseph said that
Sheffield
should not make the government alter course, and the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, warned that Conservative MPs would see British efforts to negotiate as a climbdown after the loss of
Sheffield
. Norman Fowler, the Secretary of State for Social Services,
*
said, ‘we are giving up a great deal: e.g. on self-determination,’ and Michael Heseltine declared, ‘I regard terms
in front of us as abandoning the things we set out to achieve.’ Willie Whitelaw, on the other hand, argued that the Cabinet should not refuse the proposals because, if it did so, ‘We’ll lose [the] Americans,’ and might lose in the House of Commons. He recommended acceptance, sticking in a few ‘unfundamental changes’ which would improve Britain’s position.

It was the Prime Minister herself who pushed colleagues towards acceptance. She agreed that the Peruvian Plan ‘compromises principles’, but Britain simply would not be able to get everything it wanted into the plan: ‘I fear we can’t get wishes of people and self-determination … If we can get something different on local administration, exclusion of South Georgia [the government was anxious to establish that the ‘dependent territories’ such as the reoccupied South Georgia were not necessarily to be covered by the same agreement as the Falkland Islands], guarantee from US, then worth it.’ Pym then told Mrs Thatcher that she would not get the ‘consultation with the elected representatives of the people’ that she wished to insist on. The discussion prompted Jopling to warn of the danger of leaks about a divided Cabinet. No, said Mrs Thatcher, supported by Geoffrey Howe, it was ‘not a basically divided Cabinet’, and – to counter the undercurrent which most worried her – she added, ‘
Sheffield
not a fatal moment’.
⁶⁷
The official minutes of the Cabinet recorded the collective view that acceptance of the plan was required for presentational reasons: ‘If Britain were seen to reject [it], she would be severely criticised by international opinion, which was already moving against her.’
⁶⁸
Far from scuppering the US–Peruvian proposals, the sinking of the
Belgrano
had the opposite effect. Followed by the loss of
Sheffield
, it forced Mrs Thatcher to be seen to accept them.

After Cabinet, the Prime Minister replied to the US President. Unlike Reagan’s slightly chilly letter, hers was more personal: ‘I am writing to you separately because I think you are the only person who will understand the significance of what I am saying.’ She had, she said, always tried ‘to stay loyal to the United States’; the friendship between the two countries ‘matters very much to the future of the free world’. Argentina, on the other hand, did not respect basic principles. She feared that, under US suggestions, ‘we shall find that in the process of negotiation democracy and freedom for the Falklanders will have been compromised.’ The settlement proposed ‘did not provide unambiguously for the right of self-determination’, and Haig had rejected any self-determination provision because Argentina would turn it down. Therefore, ‘I have tried to temper Al Haig’s latest proposals a little by suggesting that the interim administration must at least consult with the locally elected representatives. It is not too much
to ask – and I do not think you will turn it down.’
⁶⁹
In short, she was following the Willie Whitelaw recommendation: although complaining as she did so, she was making only ‘unfundamental changes’, while acceding to Reagan’s request. In the commentary for the President which he attached to Mrs Thatcher’s reply, Judge Clark wrote: ‘In a word, Maggie accepts the proposal.’
⁷⁰

In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher says that she was ‘deeply unhappy about the US/Peruvian proposals’ and implies that Pym was weaker on the subject than she was, ‘but we had to make some response.’ She makes much of the modifications to the proposals which the Cabinet agreed and which she communicated to Reagan. She records that her original letter to Reagan had to be redrafted because it ‘revealed perhaps too much of my frustration’.
⁷¹
This is true, but grossly understates the facts. The phrase about Reagan being ‘the only person who will understand the significance of what I am saying’ survived into the final draft, but had more or less lost the powerful meaning it possessed in the first. That first draft, written in her own hand, was a personal letter from Margaret to Ron, half begging, half defiant – a cry of wounded friendship. In it, she bluntly rejected Reagan’s claim that his suggestions were ‘faithful to the basic principles we must protect’ – ‘alas they are not.’ Haig was telling Pym, she said, that Argentina would not accept the Falklanders’ right of self-determination: ‘So our principles are no longer what we believe, nor those we were elected to serve, but what the dictator will accept.’ And the proposals for interim administration gave Argentina more power than before it invaded – ‘what then is to stop another invasion to achieve the rest?’ ‘Before this aggression,’ Mrs Thatcher went on, ‘the Falklands were a democratic country, with liberty and a just law. After the proposed settlement, the one thing they
cannot have
is the only way of life they want. Perhaps you will now see why I feel so deeply about this. That our traditional friendship, to which I still loyally adhere, should have brought me and those I represent into conflict with fundamental democratic principles sounds impossible while you are at the White House and I am at No. 10.’
⁷²
Her message was that Reagan’s proposed deal with Argentina betrayed both their common beliefs and their friendship. If she had sent it, she would have forced the President to choose one side or the other. In the end, she did not dare.

Mrs Thatcher hints at some of this in her memoirs, but she cannot quite bring herself to say that she did, though with qualifications, approve the plan which she so much disliked. She accepted what she had avoided accepting with Haig’s original set of ideas in April, and what, at that time, she had so excoriated Francis Pym for advocating. In her memoirs, the actual decision of the Cabinet to accept and the full purport of her letter
to Reagan are glossed over. In her private account, the days from 5 to 12 May are simply not described. This suggests that she had a bad conscience on the subject. After all, she had regarded Pym’s attempt to get the April Haig proposals accepted as ‘the crisis of Britain’s honour’. The ‘Peruvian’ proposals, by her own admission, would have removed the self-governing and self-determining rights of the Falkland Islanders and removed the islands from British administration. Was this, after British blood had been shed, honourable?

Most of those close to Mrs Thatcher in the process have tended to explain her conduct away. Antony Acland considered that ‘Reluctantly, she thought the Peruvian proposals
would
satisfy the wishes of the islanders.’
⁷³
Both John Coles and Clive Whitmore believed that she accepted in perfect confidence that Argentina would refuse: it was ‘inconceivable’ to her that Argentina would ever accept any plan which made its troops leave the Falklands,
⁷⁴
but the US–Peruvian plan was something that ‘had to be explored’ to sustain the presentation of the British case.
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For Cecil Parkinson, the risk involved in accepting the plan gained no more than her ‘glancing attention’ because it was so clear that Argentina would reject it.
⁷⁶
This evidence by people close to the scene needs to be carefully weighed. They are certainly correct when they state that Mrs Thatcher was always highly doubtful that Argentina would ever make a genuine deal, and this made it easier for her to offer apparent concessions. However, it is also clear that she did accept reductions of the rights of the Falklanders and, indeed, of Britain, against which she had always publicly set her face, and that she did so not only out of calculation, but out of desperation. The international sympathy for Britain after the sinking of the
Belgrano
and even of
Sheffield
became dramatically less favourable and the mood at home became more febrile. Above all, the pressure from the United States suddenly increased. The interventions of Haig and, which weighed more strongly with her, of Reagan convinced her that she could no longer rely on their support unless she gave them some concessions. So she conceded. And in her letter to Reagan, she did clearly acknowledge and plan for the possibility of Argentine acceptance. The letter ended: ‘Assuming that they [the Haig proposals] are accepted by Argentines, then during the negotiation period that will follow we shall have to fight fiercely for the rights of the Falklanders who have been so loyal to everything in which you and we believe.’
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Perhaps there was a complicity between Reagan and herself implied in the letter she eventually sent – I will pretend to accept, and you will pretend to accept my acceptance, and will make sure that I am not held to it. That is the implication of her tone, but there is no evidence that she had any assurances from Reagan on any of this. On 6 May, Ingham
told her that the press reported a ‘Big new diplomatic drive with UK apparently shifting its position over withdrawal as a precondition for ceasefire’.
⁷⁸
She put her disapproving wiggly line beside this, but it was not an inaccurate picture. The truth is that she was in a tight corner, and gave away much more than she wanted. She may have been tactically correct to do what she did, but she had troubled her own conscience.