Ridley: Peter, we just can’t afford to keep those islands on indefinitely.
Carrington: Well I’d sooner face a herd of charging rhino. Ian Curteis, The Falklands Play, BBC 2002
Why can’t we simply leave things as they are? ibid. Thatcher
There a leader in La Prensa this morning which says that the only thing that holds this government now together is a war. ibid. Carrington to Thatcher
Can we leave Suez out of this conversation? ibid. Knott
The Government has now decided that a large task force will set sail as soon as preparations are complete. HMS Invincible will be in the lead and will sail on Monday. ibid.
It’s recognising the moment that justifies everything else. ibid. Willie Whitelaw
If in our hearts we really believe that Britain is dead, then it would be a crime of the direst and blackest sort to send in those men to fight, a crime of which the country would very soon find us guilty because their hearts were not in it. ibid. Thatcher
Mr [Alexander] Haig’s visit is perhaps the last opportunity to avoid a military confrontation but what real chance does he have? ibid. BBC news report from Argentina
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was a triumphant assertion of Britain’s power in the world. But it was held in a city that was still ruined from the bombing ten years before. Britain had been bankrupted by the War. Many of those clustered around the new Queen knew that it could no longer afford to rule the world. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set I: Who Pays Wins ***** Channel 4 1999
Colonel David Sterling, a war hero famous for founding the Special Air Service, the SAS. What Sterling would do was to sell to other countries Britain’s military power: Britain would supply them with modern weapons and with mercenaries who would fight their wars for them. ibid.
Sterling set up his own political party called Capricorn Africa. He proposed an alternative form of power where people like himself would civilise the black majority. It attracted widespread support among the white middle-class settlers. But it was firmly rejected by politicians in London. ibid.
In 1962 John Aspinall opened his own gambling club, the Clermont Club in Mayfair. Stirling was one of its members. The Clermont was deliberately designed to recreate a time when Britain had been rich and powerful. The set that Aspinall gathered around him at the Clermont were like Stirling disaffected right wingers, men who felt themselves out of tune with the consensus politics of the post-war world: they included James Goldsmith, a playboy and ferocious gambler who was to become a close friend of Stirling’s; the tycoon Tiny Roland who Stirling already knew from his time in Africa; Lord Lucan, a descendant of the man who had led the Charge of the Light Brigade; and Jim Slater, a takeover tycoon and asset-stripper who ran the notorious Slater-Walker. What united all these men was a belief in decisive action: it was this they believed that made Britain great not moderate post-war governments. ibid.
Then an event occurred in the Middle East which gave Stirling the chance to reassert Britain’s power abroad but in a new different way: in September 1962 Egyptian troops invaded the Yemen. ibid.
They proposed a plan: a group of ex-SAS men would mount an operation to fight the Egyptians but they would do it privately. ibid.
[Prince] Faisal was terrified that Nasser would invade his county next and agreed to the British idea: the Saudis would pay for the war. ibid.
The Saudis agreed to pay for the British mercenaries but also to smuggle weapons into the Yemen. ibid.
What was invented in the Yemen was a new private form of foreign policy for Britain, paid for by other countries’ money. But then at the very moment when Stirling’s team seemed to be on the brink of success, an economic crisis hit Britain which threatened his whole concept: in 1964 a new Labour government was elected; almost immediately there was a run on the pound. ibid.
To save the pound Labour decided on wide-ranging spending cuts, and one of the main targets was defence. Denis Healey had been made minister of defence, and in 1965 he began a series of enormous cutbacks; he closed the overseas’ bases and brought the troops who had once protected the empire back home. ibid.
[Denis] Healey believed that instead British defence industries should make money for the country. The Americans were selling weapons throughout the world and Healey wanted Britain to compete with them and earn precious foreign currency. But Britain was not very good at selling weapons until David Stirling decided to get involved. ibid.
He [Khashoggi] told Lockheed that the only way to win the [arms] deal was to bribe the Saudi government. Ten years later in a Senate investigation Lockheed’s chairman admitted what had happened. Stirling told the British government they would have to do the same as the Americans: pay commission to their agents in King Faisal’s entourage. If they didn’t, Britain would lose the deal. In December 1965 the Saudis announced they would buy the British planes: the bribes had worked. It was the biggest export deal in Britain’s history. And King Faisal came on a state visit to celebrate it. It was also the beginning of the modern arms trade with the Middle East which has grown to dominate Britain’s economy. And from it also came a much wider commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia. ibid.
By the late ’60s many of Britain’s former colonies were being torn apart by civil war. In Nigeria the federal government were fighting a vicious campaign to stop Biafra from seceding. The British government were secretly supplying the federal side with weapons. Their aim was to protect Britain’s oil interests in Nigeria. ibid.
The federal government won helped by the British arms. But the resulting scandal clearly showed the limits of openly using arms sales as a tool of foreign policy. As coups and civil wars spread throughout the Third World, Stirling was determined to find a subtler way to maintain Britain’s influence in the world. He set up a secret organisation called WatchGuard: its job was to provide Africa and Middle-Eastern leaders with a private army of British mercenaries. They would prevent the rulers that Stirling approved of from being overthrown. WatchGuard was a great success. Stirling organised protection for leaders in Africa and the Middle East. ibid.
In Oman many of the Sultan’s advisers were ex-SAS men. They ran the Sultan’s guerrilla war against Marxist rebels. The rebels made a propaganda film attacking the Sultan and his British mercenaries. But the British won. ibid.
By the early ’70s [David] Stirling had become a successful businessman. He arranged enormous arms deals, and his mercenaries kept many third-world leaders in power. Almost single-handedly Stirling had created the foundations of Britain’s modern privatised foreign policy. It is a hidden world of vicious guerrilla wars fought by British mercenaries, a world that occasionally surfaces in scandals like the Sandfire affair. It all began with Stirling selling Britain’s military power to countries he approved of. ibid.
The price of oil had been massively increased as a result of the Arab/Israeli war. The oil-producing states led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia were furious at American support for Israel. Their action had catastrophic effects for Western economies. ibid.
Government attempts to hold down wages led to violent strikes. To Sterling it seemed that the country he had fought to keep great was now collapsing from inside. ibid.
David Stirling returned to his traditional recruiting ground, the clubs of Mayfair. He formed an organisation called Great Britain 75. It was a group of military men, many of them ex-SAS. They planned to take over the running of Britain if the strikes led to the collapse of civil order. Stirling also formed a secret organisation within the trades unions itself; its job was to fight and undermine the leftwing union leaders. Much of the money to fund Stirling’s operations came from his friend at the Clermont Club – James Goldsmith. Like Sterling, Goldsmith believed that politicians no longer had the power to control Britain. ibid.
Stirling’s mercenaries returned home after twenty years of trying to keep Britain powerful. The country they came back to was very different from the one they had left. ibid.
When Operation Desert Storm was launched in early 1991 … I reminded myself just how greedy the superpowers of the world had become for crude oil. Britain’s Forgotten Wars with Tony Robinson I: A Storm in the Desert, Channel 4 2021
‘A lot of the families feel very forgotten.’ ibid. Mal Craighill, RAF
The seeds of the Gulf War were sown years before, rising out of the ashes of another conflict that had raged in the region. ibid.
A voice reported to be Saddam Hussein announced on Iraqi radio, ‘the Mother of all Battles has begun.’ ibid.
The Balkans, what we tend to call the former states of Yugoslavia, have been a battleground for thousands of years … The former Soviet states began to crumble, and a delicate peace was broken … The most uncivil of civil wars raged. Britain’s Forgotten Wars with Tony Robinson II: Bloodshed in Bosnia
Around 100,000 people lost their lives during the three-year-old bitter, brutal and bloody war. ibid.
Many leaders in the West weren’t sure how to intervene in this highly charged and highly sensitive conflict. ibid.
In the 1950s Britain was reeling from a major financial crises brought about by the Second World War … We started suffering from a huge identity crisis as we entered this brave new post-war era. Britain’s Forgotten Wars with Tony Robinson III: Suez
Britain and allied France had no intention of giving up control of the Suez Canal. When Egypt seized the canal, cool heads should have prevailed. ibid.
The 1956 invasion of the Suez canal zone turned Britain from a global superpower into an international embarrassment all in the space of just nine days … The soldiers on the ground had to face the consequences. ibid.
The Malayan Emergency is a forgotten conflict … a communist uprising that tied commonwealth troops down for almost a decade … The conflict is hardly ever talked about. Tony Robinson, Britain’s Forgotten Wars IV: Malaysia
Over 10,000 people were killed and at least 400,000 were forced into internment camps. ibid.
Internment camps became known as ‘new villages’. ibid.