Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [109]
I shall not forget that Wednesday evening. I was working in my room at the House of Commons when I was told that John Nott wanted an immediate meeting to discuss the Falklands. I called people together. In Peter Carrington’s absence Humphrey Atkins and Richard Luce attended from the Foreign Office, with FCO and MoD officials. (The Chief of Defence Staff was also away, in New Zealand.) John was alarmed. He had just received intelligence that the Argentinian Fleet, already at sea, looked as if they were going to invade the islands on Friday 2 April. There was no ground to question the intelligence. John gave the MoD’s view that the Falklands could not be retaken once they were seized. This was terrible, and totally unacceptable. I could not believe it: these were our people, our islands. I said instantly: ‘if they are invaded, we have got to get them back.’
At this dark moment comedy intervened. The Chief of the Naval Staff, Sir Henry Leach, was in civilian dress, and on his way to the meeting had been detained by the police in the Central Lobby of the House of Commons. He had to be rescued by a whip. When he finally arrived, I asked him what we could do. He was quiet, calm and confident: ‘I can put together a task force of destroyers, frigates, landing craft, support vessels. It will be led by the aircraft carriers HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible. It can be ready to leave in forty-eight hours.’ He believed such a force could retake the islands. All he needed was my authority to begin to assemble it. I gave it him, and he left immediately to set the work in hand. We reserved for Cabinet the decision as to whether and when the task force should sail.
Before this, I had been outraged and determined. Now my outrage and determination were matched by a sense of relief and confidence. Henry Leach had shown me that if it came to a fight the courage and professionalism of Britain’s armed forces would win through. It was my job as Prime Minister to see that they got the political support they needed. But first we had to do everything possible to prevent the appalling tragedy, if it was still humanly possible to do so.
Our only hope now lay with the Americans — friends and allies, and people to whom Galtieri, if he was still behaving rationally, should listen. At the meeting we drafted and sent an urgent message to President Reagan asking him to press Galtieri to draw back from the brink. This the President immediately agreed to do.
At 9.30 on Thursday morning, 1 April, I held a Cabinet, earlier than usual so that a meeting of the Overseas and Defence Committee of the Cabinet (OD) could follow it before lunch. The latest assessment was that an Argentine assault could be expected about midday our time on Friday. We thought that President Reagan might yet succeed. However, Galtieri refused altogether at first to take the President’s call. He deigned to speak to the President only when it was too late to stop the invasion. I was told of this outcome in the early hours of Friday morning and I knew then that our last hope had now gone.
But how seriously did the Argentinians take American warnings anyway? On the evening of Friday 2 April as the invasion was proceeding, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Mrs Kirkpatrick, was attending a gala dinner given by the Argentinian Ambassador in her honour. As our ambassador later asked her: how would Americans have felt if he had dined at the Iranian Embassy the night that the American hostages were seized in Tehran? Unfortunately the attitudes of Mrs Kirkpatrick and some other members of the US Administration were at this point of considerable importance.
At 9.45 on Friday morning Cabinet met again. I reported that an Argentine invasion was now imminent. We would meet later in the day to consider once more the question of sending a task