[Tomvart]

The media are reporting today that Lord Carrington, the last serving member of Churchills '50's government, and the foreign secretary during the Falklands conflict has died aged 99.

According to the BBC.....
He resigned as foreign secretary in 1982 after the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentine forces...........After he resigned, taking responsibility for the failure to predict the Argentine invasion, Mrs Thatcher described his resignation as a "devastating blow for Britain".

Surely it wasn't about him predicting anything? He just needed to listen to his intelligence and act.

Carrington always denied being aware of any prior intelligence of the Argentine Invasion, despite there being documented evidence of repeated warnings given many months in advance from both the Governor - Rex Hunt and my old CO (The captain of HMS Endurance) the late Captain Nick Barker.

Nick Barker had his very promising Naval career destroyed by his attempts at raising awareness of the impending attack, (he was sending repeated signals and letters back to both Whitehall, the FCO and very wide distribution around major RN commands, which he was ordered to stop - he chose to ignore those warnings and by way of punishment, he remained a Captain until retiring, never again holding a front-line seagoing command after the war).

The question I have really is, as the Foreign secretary - how can he not have heard such crucial intelligence, information from several different sources that was fed into numerous government and service organisations?

Nick Barker always told us that the conflict was utterly preventable and need not have happened, had HMG listened to the warnings from the people on the ground given many months before.

Having served under Nick when he was my CO - I can say trusted Nick Barker implicitly, he was universally respected by his crews as a great seaman, an outstanding CO, but more importantly - he was honest, courageous, determined and principled.

I also have a natural mistrust for politicians (across all parties), so my opinion on this is somewhat biased........

I would be very interested to hear what the consensus is on SH?