Despite his own stalwart position, Douglas-Home was careful to ensure the widest possible spectrum of views should be aired in the paper. Never shy to criticize, Fred Emery told him ‘your leaders have been a sight too romantic, losing sight of the practicalities’.18 David Watts was in the camp that argued that the islanders had precious little future without Argentine collaboration and that the utility of 1800 Falkland Islanders to the national interest was less than the financial portfolios of the 17,000 British citizens living in Argentina. A full-page pro-Argentine advert was published.19 The historian and anti-nuclear campaigner E. P. Thompson was given much of the Op-Ed page to explain ‘why neither side is worth backing’. He concluded that Mrs Thatcher’s ‘administration has lost a by-election in Glasgow and it needs to sink the Argentine navy in revenge’.20 The letters page started to fill. Many disliked Douglas-Home’s editorial line. The former Labour Paymaster-General, Lord (George) Wigg got personal:
I have no confidence in improvised military adventures in pursuit of undefined objectives, and my doubts are further emphasized by the attitude of The Times which, during my lifetime, has been wrong on every major issue, and I have little doubt that the time will come when your current follies will be added to the long list of failures to serve your country with wisdom in her hour of need.21
Sackloads of letters abhorred the idea of a resolution through violence in the South Atlantic. The playwright William Douglas-Home (the editor’s uncle) was among those wondering if a referendum could be held to ask the islanders whether they wanted to be evacuated and, if so, to where, ‘otherwise a situation might arise in which the Union Jack flew again on Government House with hardly anybody alive to recognize it’. Four to five hundred letters were arriving at Gray’s Inn Road every day. Leon Pilpel, the letters page editor, considered that in the past thirty years only two other issues had generated comparable levels of correspondence – the 1956 Suez crisis and the paper’s resumption in 1979 after its eleven-month shutdown. In the first three weeks of the crisis the number of letters received suggested that a little over half disagreed with the paper’s editorial line and favoured a negotiated settlement rather than using the Task Force. But there were also sackloads of letters from America supporting the Prime Minister’s resolve.22 It was hard to gauge to what extent this reflected most Times readers’ views. Doubtless an anti-war editorial policy would have stimulated a greater torrent of pro-war letters.
Among broadsheets, The Times and the Daily Telegraph stood alone in unambiguously supporting the Task Force’s objectives. Not even all the ‘Murdoch Press’ (as the left now chose to call it) supported the war. The Sunday Times’s editor, Frank Giles, believed ‘The Times’s leaders brayed and neighed like an old war horse’.23 By contrast, the Sunday Times warned its readers that any attempt to retake the islands by force would be ‘a short cut to bloody disaster’. Impressed by no force other than that of the market, the Financial Times opposed sending the Task Force. Britain, it maintained, should not seek to retain control of an ‘anachronism’. Instead it should propose turning the islands over to a UN Trusteeship.24 The Guardian became the main protest sheet against liberating the islands. The paper’s star columnist, Peter Jenkins, perfectly encapsulating the Guardian mindset by warning, ‘We should have no wish to become the Israelis of Western Europe’. The strident tone adopted by the Sun – derided for turning from ‘bingo to jingo’ – particularly confirmed bien pensant opinion against liberating the Falklands. Accusations of fifth columnists in the fourth estate raised temperatures further. The Guardian’s editor, Peter Preston, denounced the Sun as ‘sad and despicable’ for questioning the patriotism of the Daily Mirror and the BBC’s Peter Snow.25 There would be worse to come.
The New Statesman, edited by Bruce Page, a noted investigative journalist who had worked with Harold Evans at the Sunday Times, baited The Times for its ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’ editorial. ‘It is not easy to believe,’ the New Statesman pronounced, ‘that even a government as stupid and amateurish as Mrs Thatcher’s can actually be sending some of the Navy’s costliest and most elaborate warships to take part in a game of blind-man’s bluff at the other end of the world.’ The weekly house magazine of the left exploded in a torrent of loathing, which, surprisingly, was directed not against the side led by a right-wing military junta but against ‘the thing we still have to call our government – the United Kingdom state … so long as it has its dominion over us it will betray us – and makes us pay the price of betrayal in our own best blood’. For its 30 April edition, the New Statesman splashed across its cover the most demonic looking photograph of Mrs Thatcher it could tamper with, above the bold capital letter indictment ‘THE WARMONGER’.26
The peace lobby tried to talk up every diplomatic initiative to avoid the coming confrontation. In contrast, Buenos Aires’s offers were met with the Sun’s famous headline suggestion to ‘Stick it up your junta!’27 Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy stumbled on. But as far as Margaret Thatcher and the editorial policy of The Times was concerned, it was hard to see what offer would be acceptable that fell short of handing the islands back to their British owner. Not everyone in the War Cabinet saw the matter in such absolutes. The new Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, supported a compromise he negotiated with Haig in Washington. The Task Force would turn back and the Argentine occupation would end. In its place a ‘Special Interim Authority’ would be established in Stanley that would include representatives of the Argentine government and a mysterious as yet unknown entity described as the ‘local Argentine population’. There would be no explicit commitment to self-determination. Mrs Thatcher stated in her memoirs that she believed the deal would have allowed Buenos Aires ‘to swamp the existing population with Argentinians’ and that, had it been approved, she would have resigned.28 But, rather than be seen to be negative, it was decided to wait and see what the junta made of the scheme. On 29 April, they rejected it. The following day, the United States at last came out formally in support of Britain. By then, South Georgia was back in British hands. With Witherow and the other reporters hundreds of miles away on the Invincible, there were no journalists with the landing force and the only photograph The Times could run with was an old panorama of a peaceful looking Grytviken harbour.
As the prospect of a major confrontation became inevitable, so Douglas-Home spent long periods on the telephone with intelligence officers and assorted defence experts. As Liz Seeber, his secretary, put it, ‘He did seem to be remarkably well informed on some things’.29 D-notices, a system established in 1912, set out the guidelines for the British news media’s reporting of national security matters. Whitehall had only just reviewed and extended them two days before the Argentines had invaded. Concerned that Julian Haviland’s article citing ‘informed sources’ that there was already an advance party on the