Well, I am certainly no Thatcherite, and I am not nationalistic in any bellicose sense. God knows, the lady has had her enemies in this country, and this idea that she deliberately provoked the invasion of the Falklands to enable her to start a war has never been advanced by any serious commentator here; at the most one occasionally stumbles across it from people sounding off on internet forums. There are so many things wrong with it that one barely knows where to start. In the first place, Mrs Thatcher herself was highly patriotic in an old-fashioned way; unimaginable that she would have enabled a foreign power (especially a South American dictatorship) to take over a British territory, detain its Governor, and assume arbitrary power over its citizens; in view of the subsequent defet of the Argentinians, it is easy to forget how mortifying this was generally felt to be in the UK, it was a national humiliation. In the second place, Mrs Thatcher was not an absolute ruler, and she had a lot of independent-minded people in her government. She could not have worked such a scheme on her own, it would have needed the co-operation of senior members of her government and probably elements in the Foreign Office too. Who exactly? Certainly not the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, an honourable man whose political career was wrecked by the Falklands Affair. In fact, it is hard to think of anyone who would have gone along with such a hare-brained and utterly immoral idea, and nothing whatever has come out since to suggest that there was such a plot. Thirdly, this idea depends on the notion that the Falklands war was an easy colonial war that Britain was bound to win without significant losses. That was not the case, it was an exceedingly different operation, the British losses could easily have been much higher, it could indeed have ended in failure. It is only with hindsight, and with a good of forgetfulness of the actual course of the war, that this could be regarded as anything like an easy war. As it was, some 250 members of the Brisih forces lost their lives, and I very much doubt that the military would have told her that she could count on anything less. To suppose that Mrs Thatcher would have contemplated an appreciable loss of British lives as a way to manipulate an election implies an extraordinary misjudgement of her character. And one could go on and on. This is a classic example of a massive cock-up that could only subsequently be turned to political advantage with the benefit of a large amount of luck. And that is the general view here among people of all political affiliations.
