Secrets of the Conqueror by Stuart Prebble

Author:Stuart Prebble [Stuart Prebble]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571290345
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

10

The Story Travels

An old Etonian and former Scots Greys officer, Tam Dalyell cut an unlikely figure for a Labour MP. Universally known as Tam, he is actually the 11th Baronet, Sir Thomas Dalyell Loch, and has lived for his entire life in a seventeenth-century Scottish pile surrounded by 200 acres of parkland called ‘The Binns’. Tam had studied history and economics at Cambridge, where he had also been chairman of the Conservative Association. He joined the Labour Party after the Suez Crisis in 1956 and was elected as a Labour member, initially for West Lothian, in 1962. With his impeccable manners and soft Scottish accent, Tam gained an early reputation for his campaigning zeal and tenacity.

Dalyell had held reservations about the Falklands War from the very beginning. He had not been called by the Speaker George Thomas in the Commons debate on Saturday 3 April, but on the following day had made a public statement that the sending of the Task Force was ‘the most ill-conceived expedition to leave these shores since the Duke of Buckingham went to La Rochelle in 1627’ (in which the unhappy Duke lost 4,000 of his force of 7,000 men). Dalyell’s concerns had been heightened when he attended a lecture given to MPs by the commander of the Task Force, Sandy Woodward.

Until now, however, his doubts had been largely about what he felt was the precipitous rush towards the use of force to eject the Argentines. On hearing the words of the captain, his ears pricked up. ‘… under direct orders from Northwood,’ Wreford-Brown had said, ‘I went in and attacked her.’

That was not what MPs had been told by the Defence Secretary in the House of Commons.

‘I made it clear yesterday,’ John Nott had said two months earlier on 5 May,

… that every action by our forces in the South Atlantic is taken within strict political control and authority. The actual decision to launch the torpedo was clearly one taken by the submarine commander, but that decision was taken within very clear rules of engagement … As I made clear yesterday, we regarded the General Belgrano as a threat to our forces …

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