Dominic Lawson: Patriotism is Why Thatcher's War Won Her the Public's Backing
Dominic Lawson is a British journalist.
When the 28-year-old Tony Blair was selected as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for Beaconsfield, ahead of a by-election scheduled for late May of 1982, even his own supporters could not have believed that so safe a Tory seat would fall into their hands. On the other hand, Margaret Thatcher was deeply unpopular and her party's standing in the national polls lagged well behind Labour, even under the disconcertingly scatty figure of Michael Foot. A man can hope...
In the event, Labour and Blair – who was thought to have been an excellent candidate – were completely annihilated. Only 3,886 constituents voted Labour. The party lost its deposit. What had happened? The Falklands War, that's what. The Beaconsfield vote took place while that conflict in the South Atlantic was at its height. On Max Hastings's superb BBC2 documentary marking the 30th anniversary of that campaign, one of Blair's local party workers recalled that young Tony had been "anti-war" and had campaigned on the basis that "the islanders cannot be allowed to determine the future of the Falklands".
This was presumably based on the standard anti-imperialist version of history: that the islanders were the descendants of colonialist invaders, and a way must be found, through concessive negotiations, to hand the Falklands over to its rightful owners – Argentina. Anyway, this experience of overwhelming public rejection seemed to have seared into Blair's political soul (if there is such a thing). Michael Cockerell, who covered the Beaconsfield campaign for the BBC, revealed to Hastings that Blair subsequently told Robin Cook: "The thing I learned from Beaconsfield is that wars make prime ministers popular."
Cook, the only one of Blair's Cabinet to resign on principle over the invasion of Iraq, clearly had a motive for claiming this to Cockerell. It implied that "Blair's wars" – over Kosovo, and subsequently in the Middle East – were conditioned by a gut feeling, borne of earlier bitter experience, that they would boost his standing with the British electorate. Well, it would hardly be the first time a political leader sent men into battle for crudely electoral purposes; but if Blair really did think that Kosovo and Iraq were the political successors to Thatcher's Falklands campaign, then he had clearly learned very little, after all...