Free Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography by Charles Moore Page B

statements attributed to family members in the recently released report of a prison officer are untrue, inaccurate and falsified’ and that the claims had been made as part of an attempt by the British state to ‘vilify’ the family. (
Irish Times
, 31 December 2011.)

* In 2005 the former prisoner Richard O’Rawe published a controversial memoir of the hunger strike,
Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike
, New Island Books, 2005. In this account O’Rawe revealed that the prison leadership, including McFarlane, had wanted to accept the British offer but that their decision had been overruled by the Republican leadership outside the prison, specifically by a committee which included Gerry Adams. O’Rawe alleged that the Sinn Fein leadership wanted to delay the ending of the hunger strike for political gain. This account is neither corroborated nor repudiated by the evidence contained in the state papers, but there is a bitter debate within the Republican movement about where responsibility lay for the decision to continue the strike. See also Richard O’Rawe,
Afterlives: The Hunger Strike and the Secret Offer that Changed Irish History
, Lilliput Press, 2011. Danny Morrison disputes O’Rawe’s account of events; see the
Andersonstown News
, 12 January 2012.

* At the time of the second interest rate rise on 1 October, Geoffrey and Elspeth Howe were staying with the Hendersons at the British Embassy in Washington. By chance, at the same time Roy Jenkins, an old friend of Nicko Henderson, and Ian Gilmour, were staying too. Henderson gave dinner to Jenkins and Gilmour himself, while arranging for the Howes and their entourage to have dinner in their room, an untypically gauche decision which indicated a bet about who was likely to be in, who out. Elspeth Howe said to the company: ‘Insurrection is being plotted downstairs.’ (Interview with Lord Kerr of Kinlochard. A sanitized version of this story appears in Geoffrey Howe’s memoirs:
Conflict of Loyalty
, Macmillan, 1994, p. 228.)

* In both these cases of anger, Mrs Thatcher, characteristically, felt remorse, and, equally characteristically, expressed it indirectly. To Geoffrey Howe, she wrote a note congratulating him on his Autumn Statement and its delivery (see Howe,
Conflict of Loyalty
, p. 233).

* For a discussion of these matters, see Sir Lawrence Freedman’s
The Official History of the Falklands Campaign
, 2 vols, Routledge, 2005, vol. i:
The Origins of the Falklands War
, pp. 8–12.
    † Lord Shackleton, son of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, was asked by Harold Wilson’s government to produce a comprehensive survey of the Falklands. His report, published in 1977, called for major new investment and development of the islands.

* Mrs Thatcher remembered him saying forty-eight hours (see
The Downing Street Years
, HarperCollins, 1993, p. 179), but this is almost certainly wrong.

* In fact, the lightly armed Marines resisted fiercely. The Argentine casualty figures are disputed. Freedman records 1 Argentine death and 3 wounded but others put the death toll as high as 5 (Freedman,
The Official History of the Falklands Campaign
, vol. ii:
War and Diplomacy,
p. 7; ‘Sir Rex Hunt’,
Daily Telegraph
obituary, 12 Nov. 2012). The Marines suffered no casualties.

* There is some dispute whether this occasion, which Mrs Thatcher describes in her memoirs and in her private manuscript, took place on the date – 15 April, not 16 April as Freedman has it – she identified. Freedman concludes that she was actually referring to the War Cabinet meeting at Chequers on Sunday 25 April (see Freedman,
The Official History of the Falklands Campaign
, vol. ii:
War and Diplomacy
, p. 206, n. 7), but this does not accord with Mrs Thatcher’s memory that the meeting took place at the MOD. Her engagement diary records a 9.30 meeting at the MOD.

* There were also earlier examples of actions not taken because of the pressure of diplomacy. According