Face-Off on the High Seas

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3 weekend to dissuade Carrington, whom Thatcher viewed as a valued ally. He was one of the few members of the Cabinet who could exercise restraint over the headstrong Prime Minister. He once had the self-confidence to tell her, as she got ready for an important meeting with a touchy foreign leader, "Don't say anything for the first 30 minutes." Carrington turned down a face-saving ploy suggested by Whitelaw and Thatcher: the Foreign Secretary would offer his resignation, she would refuse to accept it, and he would then withdraw the proposal. Thus he would have done the honorable thing, but his skills would have been retained.

Thatcher's choice of a successor for Carrington reflected her own weakened position within the Conservative Party as a result of the Falklands invasion. He was Francis Pym, 60, the man considered to be Thatcher's most serious rival for the party's leadership and a critic, however cautious, of her stringent economic policies. Wealthy, Eton- and Cambridge-educated and a descendant of the famed Puritan leader of the House of Commons during the 17th century English civil war, Pym had hoped for the Foreign Secretary post after the Conservative election victory of May 1979. Instead he became Defense Secretary. In January 1981 Thatcher fired him from the job after Pym opposed her on military spending cuts to reduce the British budget deficit. Importantly, Pym had questioned the government's decision to cut back its conventional naval forces while modernizing its submarine-based nuclear deterrent.

As the British fleet set sail, Thatcher regained some of her customary fire. Her basic position was that Britain would not negotiate until the Argentines withdrew. "We have to recover those islands," she declared in a television interview. Evoking Queen Victoria's words from the "black week" of December 1899, when attacking British forces were being repulsed in the Boer War, she declaimed: "Failure? The possibilities do not exist. I'm not talking about failure. I am talking about supreme confidence in the British fleet, superlative troops, excellent equipment. We must use all our professionalism, our flair, every single bit of native cunning and all our equipment. We must go out calmly, quietly, to succeed."

In setting that course, Thatcher had overwhelming levels of public support. One British national public opinion poll showed 83% in favor of regaining the Falklands. Given the choice between force and diplomatic pressure to achieve that goal, 53% preferred the use force.

British strategy was designed to use a carefully calculated mixture of both. High government officials were sure that the Argentines would never withdraw their invasion force from the Falklands unless they were convinced that Britain was deadly serious about military retaliation. Accordingly, the government deliberately harshened its rhetoric, while using every other means at its disposal to bring diplomatic pressure on Argentina. Pym set the tone. "Britain does not appease dictators,' he told a solemn House of Commons. Pale and grave, Thatcher answered further opposition cries for her resignation with the tart retort: "No. Now is the time for strength and resolution."

There were few doubts of Thatcher's resolution, or of her determination to use Britain's still formidable strength