The Spectator’s Notes

7 April 2007

By the way, I know that he declares his interest, but isn’t it rather annoying to find Norman Lamont making speeches in the House of Lords and elsewhere about how Iran is a much-misunderstood country? Lord Lamont is the Chairman of the Anglo-Iranian Chamber of Commerce, and has business interests there.

How sharply the conduct of the sailors — though the fault may well not be theirs — contrasts with that of the Marines captured in the invasion of the Falklands 25 years ago. Each generation since the second world war has had a formative experience of a British military adventure. Suez taught the first the end of our imperial role. When the Falklands crisis began, I was a 25-year-old leader writer on the Daily Telegraph. Nothing was more striking in our debates in the office than the generational difference. Almost everyone who could remember Suez assumed that we would be defeated if we tried to retake the Falklands, and that we should therefore not try. We who were too young to remember assumed the opposite: of course we should recapture the Falklands and of course (not that we knew what we were talking about) we could. We wrote a song, to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’, calling for the resignation of Lord Carrington and hymning the virtues of the Falklands sheep (‘For ’neath their dirty fleeces hide,/ Hearts that swell with loyal pride’). The confidence that victory in the South Atlantic restored allowed many other battles — above all, the miners’ strike — to be fought. Now a new generation contemplates the latest adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan which, unlike Suez and the Falklands, are long-drawn-out. Neither the collapse of British power, nor its triumph, but something more confusing, and still unresolved.