Although Argentina wasn’t part of the British Empire, there have long been strong ties between the countries. British investment in the second half of the 19th century largely drove the Argentine economy as it became a major global player, with most of the infrastructure — banking, railways, shipping — British-owned, and a third of its exports going to the UK. 

Culturally, it was seen as a rugged but reliable place, more akin to South Africa or Australia than to the weird, primitive mysteries of the Amazon. If you came across a minor character in a novel by P. G. Wodehouse or John Buchan whose income came from Argentine shares, he was intended as a steady kind of chap, rather than a wild speculator. If it was not actually Empire, estate agents would certainly have described it as Empire-adjacent. It took to football and rugby, even cricket — up to a point — and was on the side of the Allies in the Second World War, albeit for just five months after belatedly entering the conflict in March 1945.

By then, though, the close economic links were dissolving, damaged by Britain’s policy in the Thirties of imposing tariffs on goods coming into the Empire, and by the nationalizing of public services under Juan Perón in the Forties. But there was still a vague sense of kinship, as seen in the friendly football relations that were established. Argentina played England at Wembley in 1951, and in Buenos Aires two years later, the latter attracting a then-record crowd for the country of 91,000 spectators.

The friendliness didn’t last. The two countries met again in 1966 in a World Cup quarter-final match that was dubbed “the Battle of Wembley” in England, and “the theft of the century” in Argentina. The issue, as England saw it, was the physical aggression of the South Americans. This, said the England manager Alf Ramsey, explained a lackluster performance: “Our best football will come against the team who come out to play football and not act as animals.” Argentina, meanwhile, was raging against what it saw as a biased referee, who sent off its captain and permitted the only goal of the game — scored by Geoff Hurst — to stand, despite a suspicion of offside.

Most of the world seemed to support the Argentine position. There was talk of a South American split from FIFA, and newspapers from Italy and Czechoslovakia to Mexico and Brazil denounced “favoritism for the English team”. In Buenos Aires, the mass-circulation paper Crónica had a cartoon of the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, dressed as a pirate, and complained that “just as the English pirates stole the Malvinas, they made a deal with the referee to sell us out”.

And there was the rub, the great stumbling block in Anglo-Argentine relations. Las Malvinas — the Falkland Islands, as Britain called them — lay some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, and there was a long-running dispute over their ownership. They had never been inhabited by Argentinians, Britain had been in unbroken possession since 1833 and, even as the Empire was being dismantled, the couple of thousand inhabitants unanimously wished to remain British. Argentina, however, had inherited a claim on the territory when gaining independence from Spain and had never given up its demand that it be handed over. 

This meant something in Buenos Aires, though most Britons were unaware of the islands’ existence, let alone that there was any controversy. Insofar as they were known, it was probably through Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). At the end of the book, when the dissident Bernard Marx is being sent into exile, so that he might write poetry without disturbing the stability of society, he asks for the most remote, forlorn and uncomfortable conditions, the better to inspire his work, and is promptly despatched to the Falklands. Thereafter, we assume, he will never be heard of again.

When the central American state of Belize became independent in 1981, the Daily Mirror provided its readers with a list of what was left of the British Empire: Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena and the Turks & Caicos Islands. It forgot even to mention the Falklands. 

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There was, therefore, genuine surprise when Britain woke up on an April morning in 1982 to hear the news that Argentine troops had invaded the islands and seized control. There was even more surprise when the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, announced that a military force would be sent to evict the occupiers, should diplomatic means fail. Such resolute determination was not what the British people had come to expect of its post-imperial governments, but Thatcher saw it as a question of principle. “The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race,” she told the Commons. “They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their allegiance.”

Moreover, Argentina was then a military dictatorship, following a coup the previous year, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri. As Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, put it, when some of his MPs expressed reservations about the military operation: “I know a fascist when I see one.”

Ten weeks later, the Argentine forces on the island surrendered, following a successful counter-invasion. Some 900 were killed on both sides in the conflict, with a further 2,400 wounded, but Britain’s objective was achieved. At a time when public services were renowned for inefficiency, it turned out that the armed forces could still be relied upon. “We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag,” said Thatcher in the aftermath. 

There were some dissenting voices, but that view was widely shared. In a 1986 episode of Only Fools and Horses, an expatriate South Londoner arrives in the Nag’s Head and begins running down the country: “The stench of defeat’s everywhere,” he says. “The old place has got no guts anymore.” And finally Del Boy loses his patience and his temper: “Somebody else said that a little while ago. A little jumped-up general from Buenos Aires, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get what the Argies got.”

It was also in 1986 that England and Argentina met again in the quarter-final of the World Cup, this time in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. It was a difficult time for English football, the very nadir of the hooligan era. The previous year, 39 fans had been killed in the Heysel Stadium disaster in the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, and English clubs had been banned from European competition as a result. That, combined with the legacy of the Falklands War, ensured that the build-up to the match was dominated by trepidation. 

The crowd was largely Mexican, with only around 10,000 fans of the two competing countries expected to be in attendance, but it was announced that there would be 20,000 police in the stadium, including armed plainclothes officers on the terraces. On one side there were banners proclaiming “Malvinas — always Argentine”, on the other a new chant: “Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?” The press did their bit. The Sun’s front page headline on the day of the match was “It’s War Senor!”, an angle that was mirrored in the Argentine media. It was left to the footballers to try to keep some sense of perspective. “We are not taking guns onto the field,” protested Argentina’s star player, Diego Maradona, “we are not going to shoot anyone. We are going to play football.”

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Maradona turned out to be the story of the match with two contrasting goals in the space of five minutes. The first was a blatant and deliberate handball, the second a sublime piece of dribbling that was later to be voted the Goal of the Century — countered only by a late consolation strike from Gary Lineker. “Malvinas 2, England 1,” exulted the Argentine press, adding “We blasted the English pirates”, a reference back to the 1966 match, and to the Falklands, when a Buenos Aires paper had depicted Thatcher with an eye-patch.

All this, of course, is ancient history now. Except that it’s not really. Argentina continues to lay claim to the Falkland Islands, and this week its foreign minister wrote of the “illegitimate occupation”, renewing the country’s demands for sovereignty talks. More significant, perhaps, were reports in April that Donald Trump — angered by Keir Starmer’s lack of cooperation in the war against Iran — might withdraw American support for British ownership of the islands. The British government’s response was a reassertion of the Falklanders’ right to self-determination; memories of the war loom too large for any sensible prime minister to say anything else.

Meanwhile, that first goal in the Azteca — scored, as Maradona himself said, “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — has passed into English footballing folklore. “Same old Argies — always cheating.” Today’s game, the latest chapter in the saga, sees more at stake than ever: this time it’s a semi-final rather than a quarter-final. But for 60 years this has been about more than sport, and it still is, even if the mood is nowhere near as volatile as it was in 1986.

The rivalry lives on. From a British perspective, there’s something a little reassuring about it. All these years after the Empire collapsed, Britain is still seen as important enough to be denounced as imperialist aggressors. There’s not even any hint of post-colonial guilt — there was no native population on the Falklands to be slaughtered or oppressed. The lives that were lost were the consequence of invasion by a dictatorship.

Following its Falklands humiliation, Argentina reverted to democracy, and diplomatic relations with Britain were restored. The long, shared history of the two countries was soured by the episode, but it hasn’t been lost. Alongside the mutual suspicion, there’s also a mutual respect. Maradona was cast by English fans as a pantomime villain, but his genius was never doubted. His successor, Lionel Messi, is even more gifted and, lacking the street-tough aggression, inspires affection as well as admiration in Britain. At heart, it remains a family dispute.

“I had an immediate and acute feeling: what the hell’s the point of having a navy if you’re not going to use it,” Leach remarked in an interview, a decade later.

The First Sea Lord’s prediction was correct — Britain did retake the Falklands. But the admiral did not just fight off the Argentine military. He also bested an opponent closer to home. In 1981, Defense Secretary John Nott had formulated plans for major cuts to the Royal Navy’s surface vessels and air power. In Nott’s view, the Navy should concentrate on anti-submarine duties. After the highly public actions in the South Atlantic — and the consequent boost to Thatcher’s image — Nott’s reductions were scaled back. Nott himself eventually resigned.

The Falklands War was not just fought on land, sea and in the air. It was also a battle in London, over budgets and resources. That is worth bearing in mind now, with the discussion of British involvement in an international peacekeeping force in Ukraine. In reality, the contribution that the British Army of 2025 could make is profoundly limited. The army now has around 75,000 regular troops — i.e. full-time — down from 102,000 in 2010 and 153,000 in 1990. Modern armies can only project a small proportion of their overall headcount into the field, given the logistics needed to sustain troops in theater, training and other responsibilities at home, and the need for operational tours of a manageable length. Today Britain could probably cobble together a brigade-sized force that, with enablers like logisticians, signallers and intelligence, might amount to around 7,000 troops.

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At the height of the post-9/11 wars, Britain ran two enduring deployments in parallel, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and both around 10,000 strong. Most of those troops came from the army. That was hard enough then, but today sustaining a single brigade beyond one initial six-month deployment would be far more complex. Equally, the equipment a British contingent could take now would be limited. In the late 2000s, as the army’s operations in Afghanistan ramped up, the organization scaled back the programs needed to maintain, upgrade and potentially replace its heavy vehicle fleet: the Challenger 2 tank, the AS-90 self-propelled artillery piece, and the Warrior armored infantry fighting vehicle. Instead, resources went towards a new generation of vehicles designed to resist roadside bombs, the signature weapons of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns.

Coming up for two decades on, almost the entire working British AS-90 fleet has been given to Ukraine. Most Challenger 2s are tied up in a much-delayed upgrade program, and so are also unavailable, while Warrior is on its last legs. As an interim artillery capability, Britain bought 14 wheeled self-propelled Archer guns from Sweden; perhaps eight of these are deployable.

The likely British formation that could initially go to Ukraine, 7th Light Mechanised Brigade, is equipped with Foxhound and Jackal, Afghanistan vintage vehicles, which have little protection against conventional heavy weapons. “The problem with it though is it doesn’t have any heavy weapons,” Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army officer, says of 7th Brigade. “It doesn’t have sufficient armored protection — armored vehicles — and it doesn’t have any artillery.”

“The British Army is in the worst state it’s been since Dunkirk,” adds Francis Tusa, the editor of the Defense Analysis newsletter. “The only difference was, of course, in 1940 the war production had started two and a half years previously, and they were able to re-equip the army quite rapidly. It’s not the case here.”

The store cupboard, then, is pretty bare. However, the aspect that is often missed in the public debate is the difference in the way a potential operation is perceived internally, within a professional military, compared to externally. This boils down to a question of obligation versus opportunity. From an outsider’s perspective, sending British troops to Ukraine — particularly with very uncertain US support — is a fraught political call. Inside the British Army, however, for the past three decades at least, a chance to deploy into the field has almost always been perceived with great enthusiasm, up to the point where things go badly wrong.

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The reason for this is that the central business of armies — fighting — does not occur all the time. You can spend a working lifetime in uniform without ever doing it for real. Since the British Army pulled out of Helmand in late 2014 — more than 10 years ago now — it has sent troops to Eastern Europe and deployed special forces, in small numbers, in combat in the Middle East. But the field army has not had a clear role at all. And 10 years is two entire generations of junior soldiers and officers. The “Spicier Subaltern Memes” Instagram account gives an insight into the culture that results. “When you asked the guy who called you a REMF to talk about his last operational tour,” reads one post, as a mechanical mouth spouts gibberish. A REMF is a “rear echelon mother fucker”, the traditional slight troops in combat throw at those in safe rear area jobs.

In this world, the prospect of a real operation becomes an exciting one. A big deployment does not just mean troops on the ground. It would mean resources, equipment, budgets, promotions, perhaps equally a sense of renewed mission. The Russian invasion of Ukraine gave a theoretical post-Afghanistan purpose to the army, but not the resources to really step up to that. Sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine could open the resource taps, though it seems that the recent announcements from Downing Street do not follow much actual consultation with the army’s own planners. “If you do want 72,000 soldiers to be available at the drop of a hat,” Tusa writes, “the operations budget is probably going to have to treble, if not quadruple.”

The senior army leadership of 2025 are seasoned and experienced individuals. Roly Walker, the current Chief of the General Staff, led a battlegroup in Afghanistan in 2009. But his cohort have spent their entire working lives in a shrinking institution. The prospect of purpose and action is therefore — for entirely understandable reasons — often an enticing one for them too. However, excitement can also become a blinding force.

After interviewing numerous retired senior officers for my book, I came to the conclusion that their job is largely a custodial one. The vast shrinking of the British military that has occurred since the Second World War means that the opportunity to actually command troops in the field at the scale that corresponds to rank is almost gone. In 2023, the British Army had nine lieutenant generals, a rank that historically would command a corps, maybe 30,000 troops. None of them will ever do that in an army that contains in total fewer than 100,000 soldiers.

In this context, the real emotional pull of senior command is different. You are given, for a few years, the helm of an institution to which you have devoted your entire adult life, and which for your whole career has been subject to salami-slicing cuts. As a result, the ultimate priority of those at the top of the army is to keep the army safe. That generally means keeping it safe from the Treasury.

The problem is that a can-do culture that thinks an operation is always better than no operation, and that it’s always best to crack on with the limited resources available, has got the army into serious trouble before. There’s a plausible case that the post-2006 Helmand campaign was fought — at least in part — to save the British infantry from manpower reductions. “It’s use them or lose them,” Richard Dannatt, the then head of the army, reportedly once told British ambassador to Afghanistan in the summer of 2007. Helmand could provide a role for troops freed up by the end of operations in Northern Ireland and the drawdown in Iraq. There was a chance to echo the Falklands dividend that spared the Royal Navy in the Eighties. The irony is that the poor outcome of the Afghanistan operation led to the army losing much of the trust of its political masters, and the infantry were cut anyway.

The early gung-ho Helmand tours — reflected on the emerging platforms of social media, and subsequently officially endorsed by the medal and promotion systems — became highly aspirational for other units to match. But the campaign bogged down and IEDs restricted movement. The rapid march of the Taliban in 2021 eventually showed that the idea that the West had created a local military that could hold terrain was cant. But right up until the end of the British operations, there were individuals keen to deploy. They knew that in an organization in which credibility — both individual and collective — is so important, a Helmand medal would assure them status.

It is not always better to do something than to do nothing.

There is also a potential ratchet here. The more the army is cut, the smaller the realistic contribution it can make is. Yet paradoxically, the smaller the army is, then potentially a big operational deployment becomes even more enticing — the magic ticket to resources and prestige. There will undoubtedly be ambitious officers in army headquarters at Marlborough Lines in Andover imagining how an enduring troop deployment in Ukraine could transform their own careers. But they might do well to also recall the other thing that Henry Leach (at least) claims to have told Margaret Thatcher in 1982. Yes, he said, Britain could retake the Falklands. But there was also a risk that they might lose the entire fleet trying to do so.

I have never understood what the issue was with the headline. But then again, I don’t spend my time with Guardian readers or BBC news producers. Frankly, I didn’t care if the Belgrano had nosed into the exclusion zone or not. We needed to kill them before they killed us.

Simplistic, but I imagine the Ukrainians feel pretty much the same today.

To understand where that headline came from, you would have to be sitting in The Sun’s newsroom, back in the spring of 1982. Compared with today it was not just a different world but a different universe.

The fog of cigarette smoke had impregnated the walls, turning them a ghastly yellow. There was the reassuring clatter of typewriters proving the reporters were working. Phones were ringing. (What’s a phone, grandad?) Every time a phone rang there was a chance a reader had stumbled on a story that would bring down a politician or prove Jimmy Savile was a paedo. Those calls were gold-dust. There were plenty of them.

There was alcohol. The reporters would go out for a drink — but for the executives there was plenty of the stuff hidden away from Rupert Murdoch’s prying eyes. Although on one occasion, Murdoch dropped in unexpectedly on editor Sir Larry Lamb (my predecessor) and was “shocked” to see the amount of alcohol being consumed. “They’re drinking out of plant pots up there,” he said.

I remember going to one of Sir Larry’s afternoon conferences where it was clear he had been over-refreshing himself at lunchtime with a bottle or two of his favourite red. Surrounded by his acolytes at his desk (including me) he would, under normal circumstances, pick the story of the day and then hand draw Page One, complete with headline, on a blank piece of paper. Having created his masterpiece, Sir Larry would then pass the paper to the Night Editor who would take it back to the art desk to make it look good.

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Because he was pissed, Sir Larry didn’t draw on the blank page but on his blotting paper. There was silence as we watched this bizarre turn of events. Not realising he had missed the page entirely, Sir Larry then handed the blank page to the Night Editor who, being a brown-noser like me, said “Thank you Larry.”

Today’s HR wallahs (there are more of them than subs these days) would be flat-out with the goings on. There was the time one of the sports journalists returned to the office quite drunk around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, approached a female colleague and asked if it was true her husband was a doctor. When she said yes, he promptly unzipped himself and asked if he might be able to do something about this spot on his penis. Hard to believe, but when the management fired him, the journalists went on strike and eventually the chap was given his job back.

So that was The Sun, then.

It was also hugely successful. The paper was selling well over four million copies a day. Every day. The paper mattered. It had caught the riptide of the Thatcher revolution. Hostile to big state. Hostile to big unions. Pro flogging council houses. Pro big spending on the military.

Along came the Falklands War. There were two routes you could take. There was the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror position. Where is the Falklands? Is there a deal to be done? Can we fight the war without killing anybody?

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Then there was The Sun‘s position. They started it, we shall finish it. Do it to them before they do it to us. The only good Argie was a dead Argie. I inherited that kind of view from my father who had spent five years in a Japanese PoW camp. I hesitate to think what he would make of me owning a Lexus.

At one stage, the Argentine military regime was offering what looked like faux peace talks. The Sun’s response came via the headline: STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA. A classic, it became our catchphrase for the war. 

We decided to put the whole paper on a war footing. News editor Tom Petrie became Commander Petrie for the duration. Reporters were given ranks from private to colonel. I stomped around the newsroom in sergeant major parody referring to colleagues as “horrible little people”.

We invited readers to sponsor Sidewinder missiles. Joyfully it was reported that a missile fired from HMS Invincible with the words “Up Yours Galtieri” (the name of the Junta leader) had brought down an Argentinian plane.

We invented “Sink the Argies” computer games and Page Three girls were given military themes; “All Shipshape and Bristols Fashion.” Upscale stuff. Private Eye produced a mock The Sun with the headline: Kill an Argie, win a Metro. Not a bad idea. At morning conference, we contemplated doing such a competition. Strangely wiser counsel prevailed. That wasn’t always the case.

The Sun journalists were a militant lot, and the day the Belgrano was sunk inevitably they were on strike. But the printers, a bolshie collection of overpaid and underworked half-wits, would allow me to produce the paper and turned a blind eye to a couple of execs giving assistance.

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It must have been around 10 o’clock on that May evening, while sitting on the news desk with assistant editor Wendy Henry, when it was reported that the Belgrano had been sunk. Hit with two torpedoes fired by our submarine, the Conqueror.  

On hearing the news Wendy, an excitable talent, shouted: Gotcha! With headlines I have always found that instinct trumps intelligence. So GOTCHA it was. But as the evening wore on there was a suggestion that all 1,095 Belgrano crew had died in the attack.

Even for a hard-bitten soul like me, that seemed an enormous number, and I changed the headline in later editions to: Did 1,095 Argies die? Murdoch didn’t agree with the change saying he thought it a good headline. In the event 368 died.

Six weeks later, the war had ended. As with Thatcher, the Falklands had been a great success for The Sun. The paper-buying public liked our coverage and rejected the Daily Mirror’s timorous approach. The circulation gap between us grew swiftly to over a million copies a day. The cash, in both sales and advertising, for Murdoch simply crashed through the front door.

So where is The Sun four decades later? The alcohol has gone. The typewriters have gone. The smoke has gone. And most important of all, the circulation has gone. The crying shame is that the collective power and voice of ambitious working-class readers has been lost.

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True, The Sun‘s readers have social media, which to my mind is a joy. But the authority of a newspaper which could reach 12 million readers every day (that’s 12 million “likes”) has been lost for ever.

Supposing such a war happened now, what would the paper’s reaction be? Frankly there is an uncertain note on the trumpet. Even if the North Koreans took the Isle of Wight, I have my doubts they would get angry.

And does it matter what The Sun says in any event?

The paper sells around 500,000-600,000 a day. That’s a guess as Murdoch’s management at News UK refuses to disclose the numbers except to media buyers who in turn have to sign an NDA. It’s true they have a news website, but they try very hard not to cover stories which polarise opinions. They don’t want to upset anybody, which means they don’t please anybody either.

With the death of the print version of The Sun, goes the role of the editor. Clever, laugh-producing or ballsy Page One headlines don’t matter a fig in the online world. Nor does something called a news sense. There is now software which can change the running order of the site depending on the stories the reader is clicking on. 

That all makes complete journalistic (and commercial) sense but sadly, from my perspective, it does mean goodbye to Gotcha and all that. Mind you, the Argies will be delighted.

It is 40 years now since the outbreak of the Falklands War, one of the strangest, most colourful and most popular conflicts in British military history. Today this ten-week campaign to free the South Atlantic islands from Argentine occupation seems like a moment from a vanished age. But that was how it felt at the time, too: a scene from history, a colossal costume drama, a self-conscious re-enactment of triumphs past.

On the day the Invincible sailed, Margaret Thatcher quoted Queen Victoria: “Failure? The possibilities do not exist.” In the Sun, executives put up Winston Churchill’s portrait. And as the travel writer Jonathan Raban watched the departure of the Task Force on television, he thought it was like a historical pageant, complete with “pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs”. He regarded the whole exercise with deep derision, until the picture blurred and he realised that, despite himself, he was crying.

For many people the Falklands War was only too real. There were serious issues and genuine lives at stake, not just for the 1,813 islanders who had woken to find military vehicles roaring down their little streets, but for the tens of thousands of Argentine conscripts and British servicemen who were soon to be plunged into the nightmare of combat. And although polls suggest that about eight out of ten Britons strongly supported it, there were always those who considered it a mistake, a tragedy, even a crime. A certain Jeremy Corbyn thought it a “Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business”. The novelist Margaret Drabble considered it a “frenzied outburst of dying power”. A far better writer, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, famously called it “two bald men arguing over a comb”. That seems an odd analogy, though, for almost 2,000 blameless sheep farmers, who had no desire to be ruled by a junta that threw dissenters out of helicopters.

One common view of the Falklands campaign is that it was Britain’s last colonial war. But this strikes me as very unpersuasive. When we think of colonial wars, we think of wars of conquest by white men in pith helmets against brown-skinned underdogs. We think of embattled imperialists struggling to stave off a nationalist uprising, or fighting in defence of white settlers against a native majority. But the Falklands War was none of those things. There was no oppressed indigenous majority — except perhaps for the islanders themselves, some of whom had been there since the 1830s. As for the Argentines, their Spanish and Italian surnames were a dead giveaway. Indeed, few countries in the Americas had done a more thorough job of eliminating their original inhabitants.

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What of the British? For all the “Empire Strikes Back” headlines, they had actually spent the last decade trying to give the islands away. Less than 18 months before the invasion, Mrs Thatcher had sent the chain-smoking Nicholas Ridley to urge the islanders to accept a sovereignty deal with Buenos Aires. His words have a blackly ironic ring today. “Do you want the Argentinians invading you and us kicking them out in a state of perpetual war?… I mean, it’s all very well sitting here saying someone else must come and kick the Argentinians out. Of course we will, but is that good for sheep farming, for fishing, for looking for oil, for all your futures, for your children, and your grand­children and your great­-grand­children?”

On paper, much of what he said was perfectly true. Not unsurprisingly, however, it went down like a lead balloon. When Ridley flew home, the islanders saw him off with a loudspeaker playing Land of Hope and Glory, This Land Is Our Land and We Shall Not Be Moved. He didn’t come back.

Not a war of decolonisation, then. And still less a Victorian war of conquest. Yet there’s no denying that this was a war with a sense of history. On the morning the Task Force sailed, the Daily Mail interviewed a veteran of the First World War, Tommy Mallen, for whom it had been a day of catharsis. “I thought England was done for, spineless, a doormat for the world,” he said. “I’d pass the war memorials or see Nelson’s Victory and wonder what it had all been for. But I was wrong, thank God. We are still a proud country, and we’ll still protect our own.”

The fleet’s commander, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, said much the same. Two months later, bursting with pride after the successful landing at San Carlos, he too looked back to the age of Nelson. “What difference,” he wondered, “between Ardent, crippled and burning, still fighting and Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge all those centuries ago? Or between this and that October day off Cape Trafalgar as Nelson and Hardy walked the quarter deck of the Victory shortly after noon?”

The references to Nelson, the most romantic of all British patriotic heroes, were no accident. From start to finish there was something oddly 18th-century about the Falklands campaign, not least the fact that so much of it involved the high seas. One of its many ironies was that until the Argentines invaded, the Thatcher government had been planning to slash the Royal Navy to the bone. But the spectacle of the Task Force ploughing through the Atlantic was perfectly calculated to stir the hearts of a seafaring people who had grown up with tales of Drake and Nelson. And from the moment the fleet left, press and public alike relished the connections with Britain’s maritime history. In that respect, the news editor of the Sun, who took to wearing a naval cap and demanded that his subordinates address him as Commander, spoke for millions.

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Today much of the Sun’s coverage would have sensitive readers running for the hills. The “GOTCHA” headline, glorying in the sinking of the General Belgrano, was merely the most infamous example in a long series: the repeated admonitions to “STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA”, the paper’s “Argy-­Bargie” joke column, even its operation to airlift 50 gigantic posters of Page Three girls to the RAF base at Ascension Island.

Yet none of this would have seemed shocking to newspaper readers in 18th-century London. Britain fought at least seven major campaigns against the Spanish Empire in the course of the 18th century, from the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins’s Ear to the Seven Years’ War and the struggle against Napoleon, and the press coverage back then was much the same. On one side, the jolly, earthy, open-hearted Jack Tars, the defenders of individual liberty and plain-speaking Protestantism. On the other, the inheritors of Spain’s Black Legend: flamboyant, superstitious and unspeakably cruel. “A jumped-­up junta of barbarous men,” roared one Tory backbencher. “The very thought that our people, 1,800 people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals is enough to make any normal Englishman’s blood boil,” thundered another.

He was speaking in the spring of 1982, but he could so easily have been talking two centuries earlier. Indeed, it’s striking how often MPs reached for parallels, not just with the Second World War, but with the campaigns against the Spanish, the French and other similarly sallow and superstitious foreigners. “Let us hear no more about logistics — how difficult it is to travel long distances,” declared the Tory backbencher Edward du Cann. “I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. We have nothing to lose now except our honour!”

History never repeats itself, of course. But when you start noticing the Georgian resonances, it’s hard to stop. A few months after the Task Force returned in triumph, the social commentator Peter York claimed that the single most powerful “piece of everyday symbolism” in the country was the mock-Georgian front door, “strong and safe and solid… a revisionist burst of bourgeois individualism”. The members of Visage, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, with their whitened faces, billowing pantaloons and over-elaborate eye make-up, would have made superb extras in a stage revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. So too would the greatest sporting icon of the age, whom you can easily imagine roaring out “Hearts of Oak” on the deck of the Victory.

As the cricket writer Derek Hodgson put it: “Regency England would have recognised him instantly as the man who could ride to hounds from dawn, fight 25 rounds bare-knuckle of an afternoon, dine on a mountain of boiled mutton, roast beef, plum duff and cheddar cheese, washed down by ale and claret, and top it off with a bottle of brandy: a man who proclaimed one Englishman worth 10 scurvy foreigners. For Ian Botham read John Bull.”

More from this author

How to lose a leadership election

By Dominic Sandbrook

Even Margaret Thatcher, so often seen as a Victorian Gradgrind, had her Georgian side. When she moved into 10 Downing Street, she specifically requested paintings of Nelson, Wellington and George II. At a reception in the autumn of 1982, she gave the journalist Hugo Young a tour of the new paintings, proudly pointing out George I, Sir Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger and “other admirals and soldiers”. And when, in her memoirs, she discusses the moment she became Prime Minister, whom does she quote? Not Churchill, but Pitt the Elder: “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.”

Perhaps it was no wonder, then, that the Falklands War felt like an eighteenth-century throwback. In a country shorn of its imperial pretensions, struggling to find a new place in the world, it revived the image of a buccaneering, free-trading, maritime people, sometimes boorish, often vulgar, but always staunch in the defence of freedom. Here was the Britishness — or perhaps more accurately, the Englishness — of Rule Britannia, of James Wolfe at Quebec and H. Jones at Goose Green, swashbuckling martyrs in the national cause. It was cynical and sentimental, ruthless and romantic, fervently patriotic and often aggressively populist. Some people hated it. But deep down, most felt its emotional pull.

For almost two centuries it had been buried beneath a veneer of Victorianism, but it had never disappeared. “It must have always been there,” wrote the columnist George Gale on the day of victory, “for we have seen it flooding back.” Britain, agreed Margaret Thatcher, “has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.”

But it was an even more controversial politician who put it best. “A change has come about in Britain,” wrote Enoch Powell. “We are ourselves again.”

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the Falklands War in The Rest is History.