MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands celebrates Margaret Thatcher Day to honor the Islands’ Liberator

MLAs Lewis Clifton, Dean Dent, Jack Ford, Stacy Bragger and Cheryl Roberts at the Margaret Thatcher Bust in Stanley on the morning of the 10th of January 2026.

Today January 10th is Margaret Thatcher Day in the Falkland Islands. The date remembers and celebrates when the former Prime Minister and victorious in the Falklands War spent a four-day visit to the Islands beginning precisely on 10 January 1983 only eight months after the end of the conflict with Argentina.

 The trip and flight was executed under most secrecy measures in a direct flight from UK, with an alleged never confirmed stop-over in Brazil. Portugal and Brazil have always been long standing allies of Britain with the Royal Navy rescuing the Portuguese monarchy and Braganza family from the Napoleon invasion of the Iberia peninsula, helping to create the Empire of Brazil under Dom Pedro I and Dom Pedro II.

In the Falklands Ms Thatcher, the Liberator, received a hero’s welcome and was awarded the honorary Freedom of the Falklands. She visited the military garrison, met with most of the Falklands community and toured some of the battle sites, promising there would be no negotiations on sovereignty with Argentina, which since then has become UK official foreign policy, supported by all British political parties.

On 10 January 2015, a bronze bust of Thatcher was inaugurated in the Falklands next to the Liberation Monument in Stanley, which remembers 14 June 1982 when the Argentine military invasion of the Islands ended, defeated by the Task Force sent to liberate the Islands by Ms Thatcher. The bust includes a plaque with her famous statement before Parliament, “They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and allegiance”.