Authors: Patrick Robinson
The Prime Minister himself quite frankly loathed the House of Commons, and attended it as rarely as possible, much preferring to run the country from his private office in Downing Street.
He did, however, rejoice in one possible outcome of the debate: if Parliament voted to send a battle fleet to the South Atlantic, and he personally voted against it, nothing would be his fault, no matter what the outcome. Nonetheless, the thunderous possibility of being regarded as the most cowardly Prime Minister in the entire history of the nation was not terribly appealing.
Throughout his entire tenure in Number 10 Downing Street, this Prime Minister had one dominant modus operandi. He loved the flowery speech, particularly the ones with the big, bold new ideas, what he called the “great initiatives.”
His game plan was to stand up there, wearing his most concerned look, and promise damn near anything: extra cash, extra committees, better police, more for the poor, better armed forces, a prosperous Africa—the kind of stuff that takes a long time to come to fruition.
Right now he was at that point in his premiership when only the very stupid, or very needy, believed a word he said. And today’s problem required him to step right up to the plate, make a decision, and have it carried out, on the double. None of the above three points of action represented his strong suits.
By twelve noon the chamber in the House of Commons was
packed. Almost every one of the 635 Members of Parliament were in their seats. To the Speaker’s right were the government benches, Her Majesty’s loyal opposition to the left. The government whips had informed the Speaker’s office the PM would open the proceedings personally, and at three minutes after noon the Speaker called the House to order with the words “Silence for the Prime Minister.”
In the grand tradition of the Mother of Parliaments, he rose from the front bench, where he was flanked by his Defense Minister and his Foreign Secretary. And standing in front of the ancient dispatch box on the huge table, he outlined the events of the last twenty-four hours to the best of his knowledge.
Details were no more available now than they had been the previous evening. Sergeant Alan Peattie had been permitted to make calls back to Army headquarters in Wilton, and it was clear that he and his men had fought a gallant but losing battle against an Argentine force that outnumbered them four to one.
The position had been untenable from the first ten minutes, during which the assault force had knocked out Britain’s entire sea and air defensive cover system without a shot being fired. Just a couple of bombs.
The House listened in silence for fifteen minutes as the Prime Minister outlined the options, many of them optimistic. But he ended on a grave note. “Honorable Members have been called this afternoon to debate this outrage by an armed aggressor. Ultimately this House must decide—do we negotiate a peace with the Argentinians? Or, do we do what we did last time, and sail a Royal Navy Task Force to the South Atlantic and defeat them in battle on the high seas, in the air and on the land?”
He sat down with the jingoistic cheers of the Members almost raising the roof of the House, as the Speaker rose from his chair and requested silence for the Leader of the Opposition, the somewhat colorful former Oxford University 400-meter champion, Adrian Archer.
And it was clear from his opening sentence where he stood, in the shadow of Margaret Thatcher. He railed against the “pitifully weak” response of the Prime Minister, and he castigated the Labour government for its endless defense cuts, its inability to see what England stands for.
And he concluded by asserting, “Honorable Members, we belong to a tried and tested society, and it’s a society to which other weaker, poorer countries turn to, in times of need. Great Britain has always stood for a sense of fair play, and above all it stands in favor of the rule of law. It does not and could not ever condone some damn quasi-Nazi rampaging over two thousand of our citizens down in the South Atlantic.
“Honorable gentlemen, I think you know our history, our traditions of standing up for what is right—even if that has meant standing alone. We are so often the one nation to whom others turn when international crime is committed.
“I should like, if I may, to quote more or less accurately the great First Sea Lord of the 1980s Admiral Sir Henry Leach. On the night the Argentinians invaded the Falklands in 1982, he told Margaret Thatcher that if we funked this, if we backed down now and did nothing—‘Then tomorrow morning, Prime Minister, we shall both be awakening in a very, very different place.’
“Honorable gentlemen, I think those words apply to each and every one of us here in the chamber today.”
He sat down amidst thunderous applause from both sides of the divide, and the Speaker of the House motioned for Peter Caulfield, the Defense Minister, to be heard.
He stood and faced the opposition across the dispatch box. And, reading from notes, he outlined the somber situation in which the government found itself. He pointed out that Argentina, with its national, near-maniacal passion for the Islas Malvinas, had been smarting ever since the 1982 defeat. He stated that forces within the Argentinian military, which has so often ruled the country, had been building their arms and scheming for this coup d’etat for several years.
He said, “The recapture of those islands means everything to them. They feel it’s a birthright, and almost the entire nation is prepared to rise up and take them back. On the other hand, at least until they found oil down there, we were there purely out of a sense of honor.
“The Falkland Islands have always been nothing short of a monumental nuisance to us. An expensive one at that. Our presence in any form on East Falkland is merely because we may one day have to protect the locals from attack. There’s nothing in it for us, except expenditure, irritation, and possibly blood and tears.
“It is no wonder we are not so militarily prepared as the Argentinians are. They live less than four hundred miles away. From us it’s eight thousand miles. A war down there would just about double our national debt. It is not worth it for us to fight, it could not be worth it in terms of money and lives, and anyway, from my standpoint we’d have a very good chance of losing it.”
At this point the Conservative MP for Portsmouth, ex–Naval Commander Alan Knell, waved his order paper in a request for Mr. Caulfield to accept an interruption. And, in the established ritual of courtesy in the House, the Defense Minister said: “I give way to the Honorable gentleman,” and sat down.
“I appreciate the position of the Minister,” he said, “and of course I realize he is in fact defending an extremely weak Prime Minister. But my constituency on the south coast has many naval officers, and for years I’ve been hearing how appalled they were at the cuts to the Royal Navy budget. Would it be fair to say these idiotic Defense policies have finally exposed this government for what it is? Perhaps the word
useless
might spring to mind?”
The Tory benches erupted in a burst of laughter and cheers, with Members waving their order papers. On the government side, Mr. Caulfield climbed again to his feet, and continued, manfully, “The Honorable gentleman knows as well as I do that sudden, unexpected military actions by a hostile and passionate nation can cast the very best planning into total confusion.
“And I would remind him, when the Conservatives were in power during the 1982 Argentinian attack, there were as many people shouting ‘Retreat!’ including the Defense Minister, as there were shouting ‘Forward!’”
Commander Knell, above the rising din, yelled angrily, “Yes, but we had a leader then!”
At which point the Tory benches erupted with yells of support, while from the Labour benches a shrill cry of protest at this obvious rudeness echoed to the rafters.
“Order! Order!”
bellowed the Speaker, amid the uproar. “I insist on
Order
. The Defense Minister must be allowed to continue.”
Peter Caulfield nodded to the Chair, and said deliberately, “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was not attempting to make a long speech, but
I do intend to point out the futility of such a lunatic military adventure, which has almost no upside to recommend it, and an enormous downside, like defeat on the high seas for the Royal Navy.”
By now, three more Tory MPs were on their feet, and the Speaker chose Robert Macmillan, a distant cousin of the former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He was a tall man in his middle forties, and he seemed to have inherited all the Macmillan respect for tradition, plus some extremely gung-ho attitudes of his own.
“Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I never thought I would stand here in the cradle of the British Commonwealth and hear a government Minister suggesting it was somehow beyond our capacity to send a fleet down to the South Atlantic and reclaim our own territory from a foreign gangster. I mean, what’s the point of having a Navy if you can’t use it? What’s the point of having an Army if it can’t fight?
“So far as I know the Defense budget of the United Kingdom, despite all the cuts, is still substantial. And I see no point in having even a Defense Minister if the best he and his Prime Minister can do is stand up and point out we can’t do anything against a country that by any standards is essentially Third World.
“I wonder if either of them understands what it means to be British? How other countries see us? How we are viewed in the international community? Are we spineless or are we an upright force for good, which will brook no nonsense from tin-pot South American dictators?
“Do we have beliefs? Do we recognize the great mantra of Margaret Thatcher, the Rule of Law Is Everything? Or are we just nothing, a small island that once meant something? And now can’t be bothered to go and help two thousand of our citizens, currently being held in captivity by a foreign power?
“Mr. Speaker, I must ask, Who are we? What do we stand for? Are we totally unmoved by a shocking crime perpetrated against us and our people? Plainly the old Empire should strike back at the aggressor. We should go down there and blast them off our island. We should take all the force at our disposal and let ’em have it.”
Mr. Macmillan’s voice rose as he concluded, “Margaret Thatcher once wrote of the morning we landed our troops in San Carlos Water. An officer of the Parachute Regiment went and banged on the nearest
farmhouse door. And, with the backdrop of the Royal Navy warships behind him, he said to the farmer, ‘I expect you’re surprised to see us?’
“The farmer replied. ‘No, not a bit. We all knew Maggie would come.’ And as Lady Thatcher wrote, ‘He said Maggie, but he meant all of us. He knew we would not abandon them.’
“And that dogged, very British quality is what we are now discussing. The question perhaps the House will be called upon to answer is,
Do we still have the guts for it?
Or has this weak, passive, utterly dishonest, left-wing government stripped us even of that?”
Roars of
“Hear, hear!”
—that traditional parliamentary shorthand for “I agree”—rang out from the Tory side of the House. But there was little response from the government benches. There was no need for the speaker to call for order. He just stood up and called out the name of Derek Blenkinsop, the Labour Member for East Lancashire, who rose from his seat.
“Mr. Speaker, I have several people in my constituency who lost sons, brothers, and fathers in the last Falklands conflict. None of them would wish the same fate that befell them, to now be suffered by others. The 1982 war in the South Atlantic was absolutely ridiculous.
“We had ships sunk, sailors and their officers burned to death as our warships were bombed, we lost our bravest soldiers on the battlefield fighting for a barren, desolate bunch of rocks that mean nothing to anyone.
“And for what? If we had not gone down there, we would have negotiated a truce with the Argentine government, the language would gradually have changed to Spanish, and after a period of shared rule we would have quietly and calmly handed the islands over to the big country that is situated close to them. And close to two thousand fine young men from Great Britain and Argentina would not have died.
“Was that reasonable? I mean their deaths. Were they sacrificed for a just cause? Perhaps. But was it fair to them and their families? Of course not. How could that possibly be fair?
“Mr. Speaker, I have heard talk of fair play in this chamber today. I have even been told that we, perhaps above all nations, stand for that very quality. But was it fair to all of those families, devastated in the cause of a gung-ho, senseless war that my opponents on the opposite benches seem more than happy to start all over again?”
The Speaker now pointed to Richard Cawley, a former chief executive of a high-tech surveillance corporation, and now Conservative Member for Barrow-in-Furness, home of Britain’s submarine builders. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I imagine most of the Honorable Members realize the Royal Navy’s conventional-weapon submarine fleet has been cut from almost thirty to only ten. It is perfectly obvious that the new aircraft carriers may not show up until 2016.
“We have no Harrier FA2 strike force. That was scrapped four years ago and does not exist. When it was withdrawn from service, that little fighter jet was generally regarded as the most capable, most respected All-Weather, Beyond-Visual-Range fighter in the entire European inventory. Its look-down, shoot-down, state-of-the-art Blue Vixen radar provided the capability to detect and destroy four targets simultaneously.