Forty years since the Falklands War: a lecture, a legacy and a warning
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This year will mark the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War. As part of the programme of events culminating in the commemoration of the British victory in June 1982, the think tank Policy Exchange this week hosted the Falklands Margaret Thatcher Day Lecture, with a distinguished audience that included veterans of the conflict, military and naval top brass, as well as many hundreds of Falkland Islanders watching via video link. Interested readers can watch the lecture and discussion here on the Policy Exchange website.
The lecture was given by the journalist Charles Moore, now Lord Moore of Etchingham, who is of course Mrs Thatcher’s authorised biographer. It was a superb tour d’horizon of the war, seen from the perspective of a woman who faced an ordeal that was at once wholly unfamiliar, deeply distressing and yet to which she found herself more than equal. It was, he quoted one of her colleagues, the period of her life during which she lived most intensely.
Everything that came afterwards was coloured by that experience, not only for her but also for others whose lives were changed by it. The young Tony Blair, for example, stood as a Labour candidate in the Beaconsfield by-election at the height of the conflict. Though he already impressed political journalists, Blair lost his deposit and was forced to rethink his conventional Left-wing views.
He told my mother, who had fought the same seat (with rather more success) in October 1974, that his defeat in Beaconsfield was the real origin of New Labour. Moore suggested that Blair might have drawn the conclusion from the Falklands that wars were easily won. That was certainly not Mrs Thatcher’s view: she felt the loss of every serviceman personally and on one occasion was found by Denis, her husband, quietly weeping over the loss of the Atlantic Conveyor with 12 sailors.
Moore brought home the uniqueness of the Falklands conflict — one of very few wars since 1945 which ended in a clear-cut victory. This was made possible in part by circumstances that no longer exist. It would be unthinkable today for Britain or any other Western democracy to manage media coverage as tightly as was then possible in the remote South Atlantic.
The distance in time between 1982 and today is greater than that which separated the Falklands from the Second World War. At her meetings with the War Cabinet or service chiefs, Mrs Thatcher was usually the only person who had not fought in what was still the War — although she remembered it vividly. Though thoroughly feminine herself, she thrived in this entirely masculine world. After it was all over, she gave a banquet for those who had made the greatest contributions to victory. There was no room for spouses, who were entertained elsewhere. At the end of dinner, the Prime Minister rose and said: “Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies?”
Moore devoted the last part of his lecture to the legacy of the Falklands War. In his view, the Soviet Union was profoundly impressed by the British achievement and especially by the quality of leadership. They had once mocked Mrs Thatcher as the “Iron Lady”; after the Falklands, they weren’t joking any more.
One veteran, Admiral Lord West, the former First Sea Lord, asked about the Belgrano. Moore reminded us that the decision to sink the Argentine heavy cruiser was in effect a collective one, in which Mrs Thatcher followed the unanimous advice of her senior colleagues and naval officers. The subsequent long-running controversy, stoked by the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, never acknowledged the fact that no Prime Minister could have knowingly placed British ships at risk by ignoring such an expert consensus.
As Lord West pointed out after the lecture, the Argentinians were lucky that the Royal Navy did not also destroy their flagship, the aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo. Indeed, the British task force commander Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward had recommended such a course of action “in the strongest possible terms”, on the night that the Belgrano was sunk.
After the discussion, the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace spoke briefly. He showed that he at least is well aware of the main lesson of the Falklands, the high price of failing to deter an aggressor. One hopes that this legacy will not be lost on the present Western alliance in confronting the threats from Russia against Ukraine and from China against Taiwan.
It is dangerous both to overestimate and to underestimate these threats. Presidents Putin and Xi, like other bullies on the world stage, are well aware that the threat is more powerful than the execution. Yet in any policy based on bluff and blackmail, miscalculations are both likely and deadly. The Argentine junta lived to regret their misreading of British resolve to defend the rights of the islanders and the rule of law. Can we be sure that our signals to the Kremlin and Beijing are unambiguous enough to admit of no misunderstanding?
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