Falklands war to pervade Thatcher funeral
‘It made her into the Iron Lady’
LONDON, April 15, (AFP): For many of Margaret Thatcher’s admirers, the war she fought with Argentina over the Falkland Islands was her finest moment — and there will be many reminders of the brief but bloody conflict at her funeral on Wednesday.
Guns used in the 1982 war will be fired into the skies over London as the former British premier’s coffin is led to St Paul’s Cathedral, through streets lined by 700 soldiers, sailors and airmen.
Members of regiments that fought in the South Atlantic will carry the coffin into the cathedral, where Falklands veterans are joining the 2,000 world leaders, celebrities, friends and colleagues invited to the Iron Lady’s high-profile farewell.
The 74-day war for the islands — which have been held by Britain since 1833 and are claimed by Argentina — cost 649 Argentine and 255 British lives. It also saved Thatcher’s political career — catapulting her from deep unpopularity to a landslide second election win in 1983 after British troops recaptured the windswept islands from Argentine forces.
“The Falklands were absolutely key to her political fortunes, a real turning point for Mrs Thatcher,” Eliza Filby, lecturer in modern history at King’s College London, told AFP.
“She was politically vulnerable on the eve of the Falklands war. In terms of poll ratings she was the most unpopular post-war prime minister.” Argentina’s shock invasion of the Falklands on April 2, 1982 could not have come at a worse time for Thatcher’s Conservative government.
Three years after she came to power, unemployment was spiralling and inflation was still sky-high. Riots had broken out in 1981 in the south London neighbourhood of Brixton and in the northwestern city of Liverpool.
Public anger simmered further still when news came that her government had allowed Argentina’s then-ruling military junta to invade a British colony. It was make or break time for the prime minister. Three days after the invasion she sent a task force of over 100 ships to reclaim the islands, 13,000 kms (8,000 miles) from the British mainland.
“What was the alternative?” she wrote in her memoirs. “That a common or garden dictator (Argentine president Leopoldo Galtieri) should rule over the queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? “Not while I was prime minister.” Argentina surrendered on June 14. It was a defining moment for Britain’s first and only female prime minister.
“It really made her into the Iron Lady,” said Filby. “She was resolute, and that became her signature image,” she said, citing Thatcher’s defeat of the coal miners’ year-long strike in 1985, and her tough stance on Europe, as further examples of this famously uncompromising style.