Tam Dalyell, who died in 2017, was Labour MP for West Lothian and then, when the boundaries were redrawn, Linlithgow. He was elected to the Commons in 1962 and became private secretary to Richard Crossman, about whom he later wrote a biography. He was known for positing the West Lothian question (whether MPs from the devolved countries of the UK should be able, post-devolution, to vote on strictly English matters) and for his consistently anti-war position. The Belgrano Diary, an LRB podcast presented by Andrew O’Hagan, investigates Dalyell’s role in uncovering the Thatcher government’s lies about the sinking of the warship during the Falklands War. He wrote several pieces about this controversy for the LRB, including this Diary. He liked writing for the paper, he said elsewhere, because ‘it is one of the few publications in Britain that allow a writer to return to old ground.’
‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ I suggest that this is an appropriate motto, not of course for the unfortunate men of the Task Force, but for those who sent them to the South Atlantic. It characterises the whole operation – an operation, as I have tried to show in this journal, which was conceived in an emotional spasm, by the injured pride of the House of Commons, on that hysterical Saturday morning, 3 April 1982. A task force had to be assembled, because it had to be assembled, to do something about the dreadful Argentine Junta, who had taken advantage of our negligence in withdrawing the survey vessel, HMS Endurance, with her peashooter of a gun. No blow-mouth, that Saturday morning, had the remotest idea of what he, or more particularly she – and there was not only Mrs Thatcher, by a long chalk, in this latter category – wanted to do, once the task force had arrived, and, by appearing on the horizon, had automatically shunted the dago intruders out of our island. No one had the haziest notion of what their rational, long-term objective should be. When I interrupted Mrs Thatcher’s opening speech to inquire who our friends were in South America on this issue, she could not name one, even then. But MPs collectively were in no mood to care.
Never underestimate the importance of fortuitous timing in the development of events. Governments and nations can get onto a motorway, and then find to their alarm that they are on a journey on which they never intended to travel, but from which there is no acceptable exit. We are faced with a shooting war in the South Atlantic that few British politicans thought could, should or would occur.
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