Max Hastings: Britain's Last Imperial Hurrah

A 60-minute documentary, The Falklands Legacy With Max Hastings, is available to view on the BBC  iPlayer until next Sunday evening.

How does Britain’s 1982 saga appear, from the perspective of the second decade of the 21st century?

First, almost no pundit or historian disputes that Margaret Thatcher was right to go to war after the Argentines seized Britain’s Falklands dependency 30 years ago yesterday. To be sure, she acted for partisan political motives. Her own government was responsible for the series of diplomatic and strategic bunglings which caused the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires to conclude that we were no longer either willing or able to defend the islands.

Thatcher knew that the Falklands had nothing to do with the huge economic and industrial problems of this country in 1982. Losing them would not affect our national circumstances, save in one small but vital matter: self-respect....

The first test of the political transformation wrought by the war came at Beaconsfield, where a by-election was held on May 27, in the midst of the fighting. The Tories, who had feared defeat, won by a landslide. The Labour candidate, who opposed the conflict, lost his deposit. He later told fellow Labour politician Robin Cook that he learned from the experience that the British people like war prime ministers.

His name was Tony Blair, and I think he got the wrong message. The British people like wars only if we can understand their causes and win them quickly. I have always thought that public opinion could have turned against the Falklands, if the conflict had continued for another couple of months....

[But today] we could not again mount a campaign remotely on the scale of 1982. We sent 30,000 men to recover the Falklands, but when the current defence cuts are complete the army will be able to deploy only a single brigade group of 7,000-8,000 men for sustained operations overseas.

We have no aircraft carrier; when the Royal Navy does eventually take delivery of the two new carriers now being built at Rosyth, it cannot afford suitable planes to fly off them.

Economic forces are driving our continuing relative decline, heedless of our martial prowess. I shall forever be grateful to have shared in that extraordinary 1982 odyssey in the South Atlantic, though I shall never forget the price paid for victory by such men as the Royal Marine whom I knew, damaged for life.

But 30 years on, the war looks to me like a last imperial hurrah.