Had there ever been any doubt that
Margaret Thatcher possessed a great heart, then the fight in 1982 to
re-capture the Falkland Islands from their Argentinian invaders was the
clincher.
In a private memorandum she wrote soon afterwards — never before made public — she revealed her deep consciousness that those 11 weeks as a war leader were to be the most important episode of her premiership.
She revealed too her real, raw emotions — of how, in her words: ‘We learned the deep sorrows of war.’
After HMS Glamorgan was hit by an Argentine Exocet missile, killing 14 sailors, she recalled an intense, personal desolation.
‘It is impossible to describe the depth of feeling at these times . . . quite unlike anything else I have ever experienced,’ she wrote.
‘In fights for liberty we lose our bravest and best. Now we know the sacrifices that previous generations made for us.’
She had always regarded World War II as a titanic struggle between good and evil.
Growing up during it, huddled under the solid sitting-room table for protection as the bombs fell on Grantham, had shaped much of her thinking.
Now she had her own cause. But, most of all, the memorandum conveys how lonely she felt during the conflict.
The decision to send the task force to the islands 8,000 miles away on the other side of the world was essentially hers alone.
Although it was endorsed by the Cabinet, and backed by the House of Commons, it is unlikely that any other modern British Prime Minister would have taken it.
Many years later she could vividly recall the precise circumstances.
She was working on papers in her room at the Commons when John Nott, her Defence Secretary, demanded to see her urgently. Intelligence had just been received that an Argentine invasion was imminent.
At a hastily convened meeting of ministers and officials, the reports she was given were unimaginably bad. The Argentine fleet was already at sea.
It could be expected to land its overwhelmingly superior force on the islands in the next 48 hours, and there was nothing, in military terms, that Britain could do to stop it.
All she could say to this was that if the Falklands were lost, Britain ‘would have to take them back’. It was defiance of a sort, but it sounded lame and whether it made sense at all was debatable.
All the informed assessments that were presented to her in that initial meeting were against such a response.
But then the First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, appeared in the room, having decided to attend after learning of the defeatist advice that the Ministry of Defence was giving her.
He would have got there sooner to make his point if the police at the entrance of the House had not refused at first to let him in because they didn’t believe who he was.
His last-minute intervention — which Mrs Thatcher always regarded as a kind of salvation — changed everything.
He calmly ignored the Ministry of Defence briefing and told her that he could and would assemble a naval task force to retake the islands — if he now received the authority to do so.
She immediately gave it.
The frenzied mobilisation for war began at once, at a speed that both astonished and heartened her. This gave her hope that if she sufficiently willed and worked for the victory, Britain’s Armed Forces would deliver it.
Six days later she was among the millions who watched on television as a vanguard of two aircraft-carriers, 11 destroyers and frigates, three submarines and numerous other support vessels set sail.
Sending the expedition was one thing: supporting its progress and authorising its use in combat were different matters.
Again, she was very solitary at the crucial moments.
Her decision-making was made
easier — indeed, possible — by her decision to set up a small War
Cabinet, and to keep the Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, off it. This greatly
annoyed him.
Howe’s memoirs give no idea of the Treasury’s true attitude during the conflict. They even suggest that he was personally supportive of her.
But the truth was that he and most of his fellow Treasury ministers were hostile to the operation on grounds of cost.
He joked on the day after the Argentine invasion that Britain was at war but that it would probably be ‘over by tea time’. I heard this remark myself and never forgot it, nor the laughter it evoked around the room.
Later, it was clear the Treasury was a great deal more alarmed by the sinking of the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano than by the loss of HMS Sheffield.
It
was a revelation to me of the dangers of assuming the twin ‘Right-wing’
causes of sound money and patriotism necessarily went together. This
lesson, too, I did not forget.
The opinions of other ministers outside the War Cabinet were no more robust than the Chancellor’s. Some were known to be strongly hostile; others bided their time.
There can be no doubt that if the mission had failed, Mrs Thatcher would have been overthrown even faster by her colleagues than she was to be in 1990.
And failure was always a real possibility. From an early stage she was aware of this. Defeatist advice kept coming, predictably, from the Foreign Office, but it was not this that frightened her.
It was the flow of information from her military commanders, who were discovering that the logistical problems of retaking the islands were truly formidable.
Geography was against us. So was the weather. The severity of the South Atlantic winter could at any time abort the operation.
A run of bad luck could have proved fatal. If an aircraft carrier had been sunk — which was a substantial risk, given the terrible effectiveness of the French-made Exocets — the political will of the Cabinet might have broken.
If either of the cruise liners, the Canberra and the QEII — requisitioned as troop carriers — had been lost, the public outcry might have been impossible to ignore.
Finally, if the Argentine fleet or the thousands of Argentine troops on the islands had shown a little of the combative spirit of the Argentine air force, the landings could have been effectively opposed, giving the diplomatic termites time to undermine victory.
All these possibilities rendered success anything but a foregone conclusion.
Mrs Thatcher even had to take a startled U.S. President Ronald Reagan to task on the telephone for describing the war as a conflict between ‘David and Goliath’, with Britain as Goliath.
The military realities, as she pointed out to him, were just not like that.
The widely held idea that Mrs Thatcher was hostile to diplomacy is misleading. She half hoped for a negotiated settlement, even if she did not expect it. She dreaded the loss of British lives.
But she would not allow the military side of the campaign to be sacrificed to the diplomatic.
She would not delay the Task Force, because to do so would give the Argentinians time to strengthen and supply their troops.
Simply blockading the islands while talks went on was no option either, because it would mean keeping thousands of troops aboard ship in worsening weather.
On these points she was at odds with Francis Pym, the Foreign Secretary.
On occasion, she queried whether some decision was correct — as with the despatch of the vulnerable QEII carrying 3,000 troops.
But when the necessity was explained, she almost always concurred. She felt no temptation to second-guess or interfere with military judgements.
It took some time for the military to understand how unusual this woman was, in being prepared to defend their decisions in public without trying to usurp their authority.
This was very unusual and quite un-Churchillian.
When the Task Force arrived and the troops landed on the Falklands, she just had to curb her impatience and wait. It was a frustrating and emotionally exhausting time.
And the longer the fighting went on, the more difficult the politics became.
She had another tense conversation with Reagan, in which she was highly indignant, demanding to know what he would think if Alaska had been seized by a hostile power.
It was hardly the most apposite of comparisons, but the President backed down. Throughout the whole conflict, she played Reagan perfectly, with a mixture of bullying and seductive persuasion.
Above all, through all the ferocious fighting and devastating losses, she kept her nerve. In her memorandum she recalled the longed-for moment of victory, with: ‘Downing Street full of young people. It was their generation who had done it. Today’s heroes, Britain still breeds them.’
Yet in that memorandum she also twice uses the word ‘miracle’ to describe the outcome. It is an odd expression.
She was not suggesting God had yet again turned out to be an Englishman. Rather, the word reflects the mood of deep apprehension which had been with her throughout. She never let herself believe in defeat, yet at another level she had not expected to see victory either.
She now felt overwhelmed by relief. She also felt overwhelming pride in the achievement of British forces, and she wished this emotion — which she knew was shared by the nation as a whole — to be given public expression.
Hence her anger at the Church of England’s mealy-mouthed attitude to the Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance in St Paul’s.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
and his advisers were determined to avoid anything that smacked of
‘triumphalism’, whereas she wished to celebrate a triumph.
When some of the clergy refused to take part if members of the Armed Forces read lessons, she threatened to make this known to Parliament.
The turbulent priests backed down.Nor was she prepared to envisage any more debate about the future status of the Islands.
The shedding of British blood had, in her view, changed all that, and permanently.
After leaving Downing Street, she remained alert for any weakening of British resolve on this point, and protested vigorously when she suspected concessions to Argentina or depletion of the garrison were being considered.
The Falklands War changed Margaret
Thatcher. She felt different about herself. Nothing, she was convinced,
would ever be so difficult or so dangerous again.
She now knew (and knew she knew) how to cope with war — which she saw as the supreme test of statesmanship. Others also saw her differently. Her standing soared.
Margaret Thatcher did not have much historical sense, merely some rather romantic and fanciful historical notions.
So it is doubtful whether at the time she thought about the degree to which the Falklands reversed the impact of Suez in the Fifties, when the last British military expedition overseas had been humiliated.
Yet this — rather than the parallels with World War II that came more easily to her — was the most important impact.
Britain was a power to be reckoned with once more.
Not that she allowed this to go to her head. She did not imagine that every other nut would crack so easily.
She was not, for example, tempted to try to do for Hong Kong what she did for the Falklands and use or threaten force to keep it under British control.
Nonetheless, she was pleased to be told by a Soviet general that the USSR had never thought that Britain would try to retake the Falklands or that, if it did, it could do anything other than fail.
Our American ally and our Soviet foe both looked at Britain differently now. As for her, she was no longer a housewife, she was a warrior.
As with the Falklands War, this year-long, frequently violent conflict, which began in 1984, could easily have been lost. She and a few key colleagues needed all their resolve and guile to avoid defeat.
By showing that no union or group of unions could ever again render the country ungovernable, their victory made — and it still makes — the success of the modern British economy possible.
Yet, when it was over, it seemed an inglorious conclusion. Liberal sensitivities — including those of the monarch herself, according to reports at the time — had been offended by the bitterness and polarisation the strike had generated.
Britain was exposed as a less pleasant and wholesome place than the coddled and nostalgic Establishment had imagined. And though almost everyone agreed that Arthur Scargill had been to blame, few felt much gratitude towards the Prime Minister.
Just like the Argentinian junta, Scargill lost more easily because of his own arrogant mistakes.
If he had bided his time and launched his strike in the autumn not the spring of 1984; if he had been prepared to moderate his absurd demands that the least economic pits should stay open; if he had courted other trade unions by even pretending to eschew violence, if he had held a national ballot of his members and won . . .
If, in other words, he had fought a campaign rather than launching an insurgency, he might have succeeded.
Instead, the Nottinghamshire miners refused to accept his diktat and in a ballot more than 70 per cent opposed a strike.
Scargill was convinced that brute force would bring the anti-strikers to heel, and the Yorkshire miners stormed over to Nottinghamshire.
The violence on the picket lines was shocking. The police were overwhelmed
Mrs Thatcher was determined to resist and Britain’s chief constables — not energetic characters by nature — were energised to ensure the existing law of the land was upheld to prevent breaches of the peace.
Police forces around the country were quietly coordinated to a degree never seen before. As a special adviser to the Home Secretary, I saw this in action. The full extent of this central coordination has never been revealed. Had it been at the time it would have fed the Left’s paranoia.
But even the paranoid are sometimes right — and these paranoiacs had to be defeated.
On its television screens, the nation viewed 5,000 miners and troublemakers trying to blockade Orgreave, a coking plant in South Yorkshire in June 1984. They pelted the police with bricks, stones and darts.
Officers clad in protective gear charged on horseback while their colleagues pulled out the ringleaders, batons flailing.
Mrs Thatcher denounced ‘the rule of the mob’ and promised that ‘the rule of law’ would prevail. And at Orgreave it finally did.
But still the intimidation went on with the militant miners waging an ever more distasteful campaign against working miners — and their wives and children. A miner who wanted to work was beaten up in his own home by 15 men. A taxi driver carrying a South Wales miner to work was killed by a concrete post thrown on his car from a road bridge.
It is one of the more egregious
examples of the rewriting of history by the Left that the striking
miners are now universally portrayed as the victims, not the villains.
Many who lived through the period know better.
Eventually the strike collapsed, beginning with a trickle of men going back to work, then a flood. Even the militants eventually caved in.
Mrs Thatcher was solemnly told by colleagues, officials and advisers that she must not gloat.
But speaking, in unscripted remarks, to a Conservative local government conference, she said she had every intention of doing just that.
And who can blame her?
She had one disappointment. She had lent strong personal support to the wives of the working miners and she always felt in their debt.
She was dismayed when, in 1992, after she left office, her policy of staunchly defending the Nottinghamshire miners’ interests when closures were considered was reversed in the name of what seemed to her desiccated economics.
In a private memorandum she wrote soon afterwards — never before made public — she revealed her deep consciousness that those 11 weeks as a war leader were to be the most important episode of her premiership.
She revealed too her real, raw emotions — of how, in her words: ‘We learned the deep sorrows of war.’
After HMS Glamorgan was hit by an Argentine Exocet missile, killing 14 sailors, she recalled an intense, personal desolation.
‘It is impossible to describe the depth of feeling at these times . . . quite unlike anything else I have ever experienced,’ she wrote.
‘In fights for liberty we lose our bravest and best. Now we know the sacrifices that previous generations made for us.’
She had always regarded World War II as a titanic struggle between good and evil.
Growing up during it, huddled under the solid sitting-room table for protection as the bombs fell on Grantham, had shaped much of her thinking.
Now she had her own cause. But, most of all, the memorandum conveys how lonely she felt during the conflict.
The decision to send the task force to the islands 8,000 miles away on the other side of the world was essentially hers alone.
Although it was endorsed by the Cabinet, and backed by the House of Commons, it is unlikely that any other modern British Prime Minister would have taken it.
Many years later she could vividly recall the precise circumstances.
She was working on papers in her room at the Commons when John Nott, her Defence Secretary, demanded to see her urgently. Intelligence had just been received that an Argentine invasion was imminent.
At a hastily convened meeting of ministers and officials, the reports she was given were unimaginably bad. The Argentine fleet was already at sea.
It could be expected to land its overwhelmingly superior force on the islands in the next 48 hours, and there was nothing, in military terms, that Britain could do to stop it.
All she could say to this was that if the Falklands were lost, Britain ‘would have to take them back’. It was defiance of a sort, but it sounded lame and whether it made sense at all was debatable.
Margaret Thatcher was working on papers when John Nott (pictured), her Defence Secretary, demanded to see her urgently
All the informed assessments that were presented to her in that initial meeting were against such a response.
But then the First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, appeared in the room, having decided to attend after learning of the defeatist advice that the Ministry of Defence was giving her.
He would have got there sooner to make his point if the police at the entrance of the House had not refused at first to let him in because they didn’t believe who he was.
His last-minute intervention — which Mrs Thatcher always regarded as a kind of salvation — changed everything.
He calmly ignored the Ministry of Defence briefing and told her that he could and would assemble a naval task force to retake the islands — if he now received the authority to do so.
She immediately gave it.
The frenzied mobilisation for war began at once, at a speed that both astonished and heartened her. This gave her hope that if she sufficiently willed and worked for the victory, Britain’s Armed Forces would deliver it.
Six days later she was among the millions who watched on television as a vanguard of two aircraft-carriers, 11 destroyers and frigates, three submarines and numerous other support vessels set sail.
Sending the expedition was one thing: supporting its progress and authorising its use in combat were different matters.
Again, she was very solitary at the crucial moments.
Thatcher set up a small War Cabinet and kept the Chancellor Geoffrey Howe (left) off it
Howe’s memoirs give no idea of the Treasury’s true attitude during the conflict. They even suggest that he was personally supportive of her.
But the truth was that he and most of his fellow Treasury ministers were hostile to the operation on grounds of cost.
He joked on the day after the Argentine invasion that Britain was at war but that it would probably be ‘over by tea time’. I heard this remark myself and never forgot it, nor the laughter it evoked around the room.
Later, it was clear the Treasury was a great deal more alarmed by the sinking of the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano than by the loss of HMS Sheffield.
Howe's memoirs give no idea of the Treasury's true attitude during the conflict
The opinions of other ministers outside the War Cabinet were no more robust than the Chancellor’s. Some were known to be strongly hostile; others bided their time.
There can be no doubt that if the mission had failed, Mrs Thatcher would have been overthrown even faster by her colleagues than she was to be in 1990.
And failure was always a real possibility. From an early stage she was aware of this. Defeatist advice kept coming, predictably, from the Foreign Office, but it was not this that frightened her.
It was the flow of information from her military commanders, who were discovering that the logistical problems of retaking the islands were truly formidable.
Geography was against us. So was the weather. The severity of the South Atlantic winter could at any time abort the operation.
A run of bad luck could have proved fatal. If an aircraft carrier had been sunk — which was a substantial risk, given the terrible effectiveness of the French-made Exocets — the political will of the Cabinet might have broken.
If either of the cruise liners, the Canberra and the QEII — requisitioned as troop carriers — had been lost, the public outcry might have been impossible to ignore.
Finally, if the Argentine fleet or the thousands of Argentine troops on the islands had shown a little of the combative spirit of the Argentine air force, the landings could have been effectively opposed, giving the diplomatic termites time to undermine victory.
Mrs Thatcher even had to take a startled U.S. President Ronald Reagan to task on the telephone for describing the war as a conflict between ‘David and Goliath’, with Britain as Goliath.
The military realities, as she pointed out to him, were just not like that.
The widely held idea that Mrs Thatcher was hostile to diplomacy is misleading. She half hoped for a negotiated settlement, even if she did not expect it. She dreaded the loss of British lives.
But she would not allow the military side of the campaign to be sacrificed to the diplomatic.
She would not delay the Task Force, because to do so would give the Argentinians time to strengthen and supply their troops.
Simply blockading the islands while talks went on was no option either, because it would mean keeping thousands of troops aboard ship in worsening weather.
On these points she was at odds with Francis Pym, the Foreign Secretary.
At odds: If Margaret Thatcher had to resign there was a strong likelihood Foreign Secretary Francis Pym would have to resign
His position was crucial, not least
because if she had to resign there was a strong likelihood he would take
over as Prime Minister.
She had appointed him to the Foreign Office after Lord Carrington’s resignation only because she felt unable to do otherwise, despite his proven disloyalty.
He was weak and not nearly as intelligent as his supporters pretended, but he was also devious and in a position to do her great harm.
He went to Washington for talks and returned with a diplomatic solution that Mrs Thatcher described in her memoirs as ‘conditional surrender’.
In her private memorandum she was blunter: ‘The document [Pym] brought back was a complete sell-out . . . a Foreign Secretary of Britain recommended peace at any price. Had it gone through, I could not have stayed.’
It did not go through, partly because she exploded the proposals in a firework display of forensic analysis.
But even so she felt obliged to accept a compromise — that the Americans should at least be able to put the plan to the Argentinians.
She was gambling that Buenos Aires would do the job of rejecting the proposals for her, and the junta duly obliged.
But it might not have worked. She reflected on the outcome: ‘So the “crisis” passed, the crisis of Britain’s honour.’ And her own.
In her memorandum, Mrs Thatcher declared that John Nott was ‘splendid throughout’, but that does not entirely reflect her view.
He was
thin-skinned and felt vulnerable after a poor performance in the Commons
debate on the crisis. This, along with other practical reasons, was why
the service chiefs dealt directly with Mrs Thatcher on all the
important issues.
But as diplomacy looked ever more hopeless, and combat unavoidable, she wisely left operational decisions to the military.
She had appointed him to the Foreign Office after Lord Carrington’s resignation only because she felt unable to do otherwise, despite his proven disloyalty.
He was weak and not nearly as intelligent as his supporters pretended, but he was also devious and in a position to do her great harm.
He went to Washington for talks and returned with a diplomatic solution that Mrs Thatcher described in her memoirs as ‘conditional surrender’.
In her private memorandum she was blunter: ‘The document [Pym] brought back was a complete sell-out . . . a Foreign Secretary of Britain recommended peace at any price. Had it gone through, I could not have stayed.’
It did not go through, partly because she exploded the proposals in a firework display of forensic analysis.
But even so she felt obliged to accept a compromise — that the Americans should at least be able to put the plan to the Argentinians.
She was gambling that Buenos Aires would do the job of rejecting the proposals for her, and the junta duly obliged.
But it might not have worked. She reflected on the outcome: ‘So the “crisis” passed, the crisis of Britain’s honour.’ And her own.
In her memorandum, Mrs Thatcher declared that John Nott was ‘splendid throughout’, but that does not entirely reflect her view.
Mrs Thatcher described Sir John Nott as 'splendid throughout' but he felt vulnerable after a poor performance in the Commons
But as diplomacy looked ever more hopeless, and combat unavoidable, she wisely left operational decisions to the military.
But when the necessity was explained, she almost always concurred. She felt no temptation to second-guess or interfere with military judgements.
It took some time for the military to understand how unusual this woman was, in being prepared to defend their decisions in public without trying to usurp their authority.
This was very unusual and quite un-Churchillian.
When the Task Force arrived and the troops landed on the Falklands, she just had to curb her impatience and wait. It was a frustrating and emotionally exhausting time.
And the longer the fighting went on, the more difficult the politics became.
Direct hit: HMS Sheffield is struck by an Exocet missile fired by an Argentine Navy Aircraft
She
saw her job as giving British forces the time and political cover to
complete their task. This meant seeing off fresh attempts from the
Americans to halt the campaign, to save Argentina’s face.She had another tense conversation with Reagan, in which she was highly indignant, demanding to know what he would think if Alaska had been seized by a hostile power.
It was hardly the most apposite of comparisons, but the President backed down. Throughout the whole conflict, she played Reagan perfectly, with a mixture of bullying and seductive persuasion.
Above all, through all the ferocious fighting and devastating losses, she kept her nerve. In her memorandum she recalled the longed-for moment of victory, with: ‘Downing Street full of young people. It was their generation who had done it. Today’s heroes, Britain still breeds them.’
Yet in that memorandum she also twice uses the word ‘miracle’ to describe the outcome. It is an odd expression.
She was not suggesting God had yet again turned out to be an Englishman. Rather, the word reflects the mood of deep apprehension which had been with her throughout. She never let herself believe in defeat, yet at another level she had not expected to see victory either.
She now felt overwhelmed by relief. She also felt overwhelming pride in the achievement of British forces, and she wished this emotion — which she knew was shared by the nation as a whole — to be given public expression.
Hence her anger at the Church of England’s mealy-mouthed attitude to the Service of Thanksgiving and Remembrance in St Paul’s.
Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meets
personnel aboard the HMS Antrim 08 January 1983 during her five-day
visit to the Falkland Islands
When some of the clergy refused to take part if members of the Armed Forces read lessons, she threatened to make this known to Parliament.
The turbulent priests backed down.Nor was she prepared to envisage any more debate about the future status of the Islands.
The shedding of British blood had, in her view, changed all that, and permanently.
After leaving Downing Street, she remained alert for any weakening of British resolve on this point, and protested vigorously when she suspected concessions to Argentina or depletion of the garrison were being considered.
Not For Turning: The Life of Margaret by Robin Harris is released on April 25
She now knew (and knew she knew) how to cope with war — which she saw as the supreme test of statesmanship. Others also saw her differently. Her standing soared.
Margaret Thatcher did not have much historical sense, merely some rather romantic and fanciful historical notions.
So it is doubtful whether at the time she thought about the degree to which the Falklands reversed the impact of Suez in the Fifties, when the last British military expedition overseas had been humiliated.
Yet this — rather than the parallels with World War II that came more easily to her — was the most important impact.
Britain was a power to be reckoned with once more.
Not that she allowed this to go to her head. She did not imagine that every other nut would crack so easily.
She was not, for example, tempted to try to do for Hong Kong what she did for the Falklands and use or threaten force to keep it under British control.
Nonetheless, she was pleased to be told by a Soviet general that the USSR had never thought that Britain would try to retake the Falklands or that, if it did, it could do anything other than fail.
Our American ally and our Soviet foe both looked at Britain differently now. As for her, she was no longer a housewife, she was a warrior.
- Extracted from Not For Turning: The Life Of Margaret by Robin Harris, to be published by Bantam Press on April 25 at £20. © 2013 Robin Harris. To order a copy for £15 (inc. p&p), call 0844 472 4157.
Scargill's mob were villains - not victims
The miners’ strike was the decisive engagement in Margaret Thatcher’s war on union militancy.As with the Falklands War, this year-long, frequently violent conflict, which began in 1984, could easily have been lost. She and a few key colleagues needed all their resolve and guile to avoid defeat.
By showing that no union or group of unions could ever again render the country ungovernable, their victory made — and it still makes — the success of the modern British economy possible.
Yet, when it was over, it seemed an inglorious conclusion. Liberal sensitivities — including those of the monarch herself, according to reports at the time — had been offended by the bitterness and polarisation the strike had generated.
Britain was exposed as a less pleasant and wholesome place than the coddled and nostalgic Establishment had imagined. And though almost everyone agreed that Arthur Scargill had been to blame, few felt much gratitude towards the Prime Minister.
Battle: Arthur Scargill is helped to an ambulance by police during a miners' strike in Orgreave, Sheffield, in 1984
If he had bided his time and launched his strike in the autumn not the spring of 1984; if he had been prepared to moderate his absurd demands that the least economic pits should stay open; if he had courted other trade unions by even pretending to eschew violence, if he had held a national ballot of his members and won . . .
If, in other words, he had fought a campaign rather than launching an insurgency, he might have succeeded.
Instead, the Nottinghamshire miners refused to accept his diktat and in a ballot more than 70 per cent opposed a strike.
Scargill was convinced that brute force would bring the anti-strikers to heel, and the Yorkshire miners stormed over to Nottinghamshire.
The violence on the picket lines was shocking. The police were overwhelmed
Mrs Thatcher was determined to resist and Britain’s chief constables — not energetic characters by nature — were energised to ensure the existing law of the land was upheld to prevent breaches of the peace.
Police forces around the country were quietly coordinated to a degree never seen before. As a special adviser to the Home Secretary, I saw this in action. The full extent of this central coordination has never been revealed. Had it been at the time it would have fed the Left’s paranoia.
Violence: An injured policeman is carried by colleagues at Orgreave during the miners' strike
On its television screens, the nation viewed 5,000 miners and troublemakers trying to blockade Orgreave, a coking plant in South Yorkshire in June 1984. They pelted the police with bricks, stones and darts.
Officers clad in protective gear charged on horseback while their colleagues pulled out the ringleaders, batons flailing.
Mrs Thatcher denounced ‘the rule of the mob’ and promised that ‘the rule of law’ would prevail. And at Orgreave it finally did.
But still the intimidation went on with the militant miners waging an ever more distasteful campaign against working miners — and their wives and children. A miner who wanted to work was beaten up in his own home by 15 men. A taxi driver carrying a South Wales miner to work was killed by a concrete post thrown on his car from a road bridge.
The violence on the picket line during the miners' strike was shocking and the police were overwhelmed
Many who lived through the period know better.
Eventually the strike collapsed, beginning with a trickle of men going back to work, then a flood. Even the militants eventually caved in.
Mrs Thatcher was solemnly told by colleagues, officials and advisers that she must not gloat.
But speaking, in unscripted remarks, to a Conservative local government conference, she said she had every intention of doing just that.
And who can blame her?
She had one disappointment. She had lent strong personal support to the wives of the working miners and she always felt in their debt.
She was dismayed when, in 1992, after she left office, her policy of staunchly defending the Nottinghamshire miners’ interests when closures were considered was reversed in the name of what seemed to her desiccated economics.