It was a tiny, almost ridiculous hangover from empire. It may be said of the Falklands War that the issue itself was quite irrelevant to the interests of the Britain in the last 20 years of the 20th century. There would have been no political epitaph for her, as Britain’s greatest peacetime prime minister of the twentieth century. There would have been no legend of the Iron Lady. There is almost no doubt that, had she chosen to acquiesce in the Argentine invasion, she would have been obliged to resign as prime minister. Many Tories were still deeply sceptical about both her record and her intentions as prime minister. Many people believed that she would lose the next general election. Both she and her government in the spring of 1982, were vastly more precarious than we sometimes remember, even before the Falklands crisis broke. If that sounds a harsh verdict, consider what would have happened if she had not dispatched a task force to the South Atlantic. Following the Argentine invasion of the islands, Mrs.Thatcher launched one of the most remarkable military adventures in modern British history, to save her own political neck and, incidentally, the honour and credibility of her country. But, as we know, Britain did not lose in 1982. If Britain had lost the Falklands War, there is no doubt in my mind that the subsequent inquiries would have concluded that defeat was the result of deplorable policy failure by the British government, in their way as serious as those which caused Britain to become entangled in the Iraq catastrophe in 2003. But for all her declared firmness of purpose, the Prime Minister failed to adopt the logic of her own policy, which was to put forces in place, even a single submarine, to respond to the escalating Argentine military threat. Lord Carrington has described how, when he tried repeatedly to persuade Mrs.Thatcher to address the Falklands issue by negotiation with Argentina, she wagged her finger and said: ‘Peter, it is absolutely typical of the Foreign Office that you want to give British things away’. The British government failed to respond either by diplomatic surrender not by military deterrence. At every stage, there were warnings that the Argentina junta was up to no good.
Especially since Lawrie Freedman’s exemplary official history was published last year, we now know just how serious were the blunders by the Thatcher government which led up to the conflict. Its most important lesson, which Tony Blair has learned the hard way, is that success justifies all.
The Falklands was a freak of history which today to me, and probably to you, seems almost as remote as the Boer War.
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