The Falklands dispatch

A war is decided less often on the battlefield than in a quiet room a long way from it, where a single signal is read, a clock is consulted, and a person who has already made up her mind discovers what she has decided. The room is warm. The tea is cold. Somewhere on the curve of the earth a submarine is keeping station, and the order it is waiting for has not yet been written down.

THE NAMESAKE AND THE NAME

Thatcher is an old English occupational surname, Wiltshire and the south country, for the men who laid straw and reed on a roof to keep weather out of a house. The grocer's daughter from Grantham carried it into Parliament in 1959, into the Department of Education in 1970, into the leadership of her party in 1975, and into Downing Street in May 1979. She had been Prime Minister three years and a fortnight on the morning the war cabinet sat at Chequers. She was fifty-six. She had been awake since five. The Methodist Sunday school of her father's chapel in Grantham was still on her, in the tweed skirt and the cream blouse, on a Sunday morning in Buckinghamshire.

THE LONG APPROACH FROM THE SOUTH

On the second of April 1982 the Argentine junta had landed troops on the Falkland Islands, a possession of the British Crown since 1833 and inhabited by some eighteen hundred people of British descent. The Foreign Office had spent the spring judging the islands not retakable at that range, eight thousand miles down the Atlantic from Portsmouth, with the southern winter coming on. The First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, had judged differently, and had walked across Whitehall in his full uniform on the evening of the invasion to say so to the Prime Minister directly. She had her decision before midnight. The task force, two carriers and a hundred ships, sailed within seventy-two hours. By the morning of the second of May it had been four weeks at sea and was within striking range of the Argentine mainland. The cruiser General Belgrano, forty-three years old, American-built, formerly USS Phoenix of the Pearl Harbor survivors, was at the southern edge of the two-hundred-mile exclusion zone with two destroyers in escort. At zero five hundred GMT she had altered course to two-seven-zero, west, away from the zone.

THE DRAWING-ROOM AT CHEQUERS

Half past nine in the morning. The fire is on. The chart of the South Atlantic is on the carpet between the chairs. There are seven of them in the room: the Prime Minister; the Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym; the Defence Secretary, John Nott; the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw; the Chairman of the Party, Cecil Parkinson; the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin; and a staff officer with the maps. The signal Lewin has just read out is from HMS Conqueror, the hunter-killer submarine that has been shadowing Belgrano since yesterday afternoon. The rules of engagement, as drawn, do not permit Conqueror to fire outside the zone. The intelligence assessment Lewin sets before her is that the westerly heading is tactical, that the cruiser is repositioning to flank the carriers from the south-west, that Hermes and Invincible are within potential strike range by the morning. The Cabinet, he says, has the authority to amend. The decision is wanted in the next sixty minutes.

THE SECOND OF TIME

She looks at the chart. The cruiser is heading away from the zone: that is what the chart shows, that is what a neutral reading will say in the morning papers, that is what Pym, sitting two chairs down, is about to say. And yet a ship at sea turns in a few minutes; a heading at zero five hundred is not a heading at midnight; the carriers are what is in front of her, the carriers are what the country has sent. If she holds off and the cruiser comes about under cover of dark and gets among the task force tomorrow, three thousand British sailors are in the water before breakfast. If she gives the order and the cruiser was making for harbour, three hundred Argentine sailors die in five minutes who would not have died. The figure presses against the inside of her hand on the arm of the chair. Lewin has the figures. Lewin would not say strike unless he had the figures. The Foreign Office will be against this; Pym is in the room and Pym will be against it; that is the Foreign Office's function in the room and it is not the only function in the room. She has been at war since the third of April. The Argentine fleet is what she is at war with. She takes the cup of tea by her hand. It is cold. She sets it down.

THE POLL OF THE ROOM

She turns to the Foreign Secretary. Francis. Pym says, briefly, that he would prefer they hold off another twelve hours and re-assess. Cecil. Parkinson says, strike. Willie. Whitelaw says, strike. John. Nott says, strike. Terry, what is the latest you can transmit and have Conqueror engage today? Lewin says, fourteen hundred Greenwich for confirmation, fifteen hundred for engagement. Transmit at thirteen hundred. Strike. It is recorded in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, that the decision was, in her own phrase, one of the easiest of the war. The wording is hers and it is exact: easy because the alternative was the loss of the carriers, easy because Lewin had the figures, easy because she had been at war for a month. The cost of the decision was a different reckoning and it came later.

CONQUEROR FIRES

The amendment to the rules of engagement was transmitted at one o'clock GMT. Conqueror, lying eastward of the cruiser at periscope depth, fired a spread of three Mark 8 torpedoes, a weapon that had been in Royal Navy service since 1927, at six minutes past four GMT. Two struck on the port side, forward of the bridge and astern of the after turret. Belgrano listed, lost power, and went down by the bow in twenty minutes. Three hundred and twenty-three of her men did not come off. The Argentine surface fleet returned to port the same evening and did not put to sea again for the duration of the campaign. The British task force operated unopposed by major surface ships for the remaining six weeks of the war.

THE WATER, AND THE OTHER SHORE

On the bridge of Belgrano, Captain Hector Bonzo gave the order to abandon ship and then walked the upper deck while his crew went over the side into the life-rafts in a Force Eight sea. Seven hundred and seventy of them were picked up over the following two days by the Argentine destroyers and a Chilean ship; the three hundred and twenty-three who were not are listed by name on the memorial in the Plaza de Mayo. Bonzo lived another twenty-seven years and said, late in his life, that the cruiser had been a legitimate target of war. The judgement was his to make and he made it. The judgement at Chequers had been a different judgement and it had been made by someone else.

THE COMMONS, AND AFTER

The islands were retaken on the fourteenth of June 1982. British losses were two hundred and fifty-five military dead and three civilian. Argentine losses were approximately six hundred and forty-nine. The Prime Minister addressed the Commons that afternoon and used the formula, by then traditional in her, that the country could rejoice. She won the general election the following June by the largest Conservative majority since the war. The hardest single decision of the campaign, taken in the drawing-room at Chequers on the morning of the second of May, was defended by her in the House for the rest of her political life and never qualified.

THE RETURN

The hour passes, and what was taken in it is not given back. The woman who took it served another eight years in Downing Street, was removed by her own party in November 1990, sat on the back benches as Member for Finchley until 1992, went to the Lords as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, and lived until April 2013. The name she carried, an occupational name out of the south country for the men who laid roof against rain, is one of the commoner surnames of southern English ancestry in the diaspora. The names of the three hundred and twenty-three Argentine sailors are cut into stone in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The names of the British dead of the campaign are on the memorial at the foot of Whitehall. There is no memorial at Chequers; only a drawing-room with a fire in it, a carpet on which a chart of the South Atlantic was once unrolled, and a cup of tea, gone cold, set down on a side table at twenty minutes past nine on a Sunday morning in May.