Margaret Thatcher senior member of the party and former Minister of Defence, as Foreign Minister in 1979. Although he was considered a "wet", he avoided domestic affairs and got along well with Thatcher. The first issue was what to do with Rhodesia, where the five-percent white population was determined to rule the prosperous, largely-black ex-colony in the face of overwhelming international disapproval. After the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa in 1975, South Africa, which had been Rhodesia's chief supporter, realised that country was a liability. Black rule was inevitable, and Carrington brokered a peaceful solution at the Lancaster House conference
Diana Gould – Margaret Thatcher exchange she telephoned Tam Dalyell, a Labour MP who had been pressing for information about the sinking, and asked him to brief her. Thatcher and Sue Lawley, the anchor, were in the BBC's Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush, west London, where the prime minister took questions from 18:25 until 19:00. Gould, in the BBC's Bristol studio, was the fourth member of the public to be invited to speak. "Mrs. Thatcher," she asked, "why, when the Belgrano, the Argentinian battleship, was outside the exclusion zone and actually sailing away from the Falklands, why did you give the orders to sink it?"