Question 1

Why wasn't it reported ... 90 per cent of Falklands land was owned by absentee landlords in the UK, and that Falkland Islanders were actually working tenants? How ‘paramount’ were their interests?

In 1982, were the Falkland Islanders’ interests ‘paramount’, as Thatcher kept claiming, or were somebody else’s desires secretly to the forefront?

Few people are aware, but a tiny, vanishing minority of Falkland Islanders actually owned the land they lived and worked on. Back then, practically 90% of Falklands land, including the vast sheep farms, belonged to the UK-based Coalite Group PLC (40%) and absentee landlords (50%), most of them resident in the UK.

I’d imagine Coalite Chairman Ted Needham and many of these landowners would have been dyed-in-the-wool Thatcher supporters, residing in Tory heartlands, and following the Argentine invasion, were super-keen on lobbying for a task force to be raised urgently – whatever the potential pitfalls – in an attempt to recover their stolen property portfolios.

Whoever did the pre-war cost / benefit analysis, before concluding it was worth our while venturing most of the way across the planet to recover a small number of anonymous UK landlords’ frozen, windswept properties – along with their tenants – must have been either living in cloud cuckoo land, or acting fully in keeping with a concealed, party political agenda.

I would suggest the former AND the latter…