The Falklands Crisis from Margaret Thatcher's Perspective during and after the War of 1982

  My paper is focused on the way Margaret Thatcher reacted to the Argentine invasion during and after the crisis. The invasion and Britain's repossession of  the Falkland Islands' transformed both the British political landscape and Thatcher's own authority. Thatcher's winning the 1983 British elections, partly due to her handling of the Falklands crisis, allowed her to shape the British socio-political scene for quite a long time. I seek to show that Thatcher used two different lenses to look at the Falklands crisis: one during the conflict and another sometime later. Five speeches delivered during the crisis are juxtaposed to later statements in her memoirs The Downing Street Years. I shall argue that Thatcher handled the Falklands crisis in the way she had intended, as a female Prime Minister in a parliament dominated by men. But with hindsight she looked at the crisis from another perspective as a writer of a significant episode in Britain's history, implying that the whole event should be reconsidered or rewritten.