Britain had more cordial relations with the Argentinian dictatorship of 1976-83 than you might imagine, given Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric about standing up to the junta during the Falklands War. Both Labour and Conservative governments sold arms to Argentina before 1982. Thatcher even invited the dictatorship’s finance minister José Martínez de Hoz – an Anglophile who favoured tweed jackets and shared her free-market philosophy – to Downing Street in June 1980. ‘I very much enjoyed our meeting,’ she wrote to him afterwards.

Britain remains staunchly committed to upholding the right of the Falkland Islanders, and of the Falkland Islanders alone, to determine their own future. That was the fundamental principle that was at stake 30 years ago: and that is the principle which we solemnly reaffirm today. David Cameron’s speech marking the thirtieth anniversary of the conflict over the Malvinas islands reiterates a ‘fundamental principle’ that is not only inapplicable in the case of the Malvinas but is conveniently ignored elsewhere if Britain’s strategic interests require it.

Children quickly master the idea of fairness. On my five-year-old son’s lips, ‘It’s not fair!’ covers an impressive variety of unwelcome contingencies, like his not getting as much ice-cream as he wants, or the fact that it isn’t snowing. Some optimistic political theorists think this shows that an instinct for fairness is hard-wired, or acculturated early on. Others suspect that it shows how fluently humans adapt principled talk to self-interest. On 22 February, Desire Petroleum, the UK firm set up to prospect for oil in the North Falkland Basin, began exploratory drilling, in the face of Argentine objections.