Diana Gould

An exchange on 24 May 1983 between Diana Gould, an English schoolteacher and former Women's Royal Naval Service meteorological officer, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was voted in 1999 as one of the most memorable moments in British television.

, a cruiser, sank with the loss of 323 lives on 2 May 1982, after Thatcher gave the order to attack it when it sailed near a 200-mile exclusion zone the British had declared around the Falkland Islands. It was hit by two Mark 8 torpedoes launched by , a nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine. The sinking was controversial, in part because of a dispute as to whether the ship had been heading towards or away from the exclusion zone when it was hit. Gould believed it had been sailing away from the exclusion zone. It was made public in 2011 that General Belgrano had in fact been ordered to sail towards it. It was described as "the day Margaret Thatcher met her match". Thatcher was reportedly angry that the BBC had allowed the question to be asked. Gould wrote a book about her experience, On the Spot: The Sinking of the Belgrano (1984).

Diana Gould Diana Sydney Gould (; 18 April 1926 – 3 December 2011) was born in Clifton, Bristol. After attending Howard Gardens Grammar School in Cardiff and winning a scholarship to Cambridge, she studied geography at Newnham College, Cambridge, and graduated with first-class honours. She was also awarded blues for hockey, swimming, and diving. After Cambridge, she became a meteorological officer in Cornwall with the Women's Royal Naval Service and married a fellow serviceman, Clifford Gould of the Fleet Air Arm. In 1955, after leaving the navy, Gould became a part-time PE teacher in Cirencester. Her husband also became a teacher, working at Powell's School and Stratton Primary School in Cirencester. The couple had four children.

Gould had studied the Falklands and the Antarctic at Cambridge and had closely followed the discussions about the Belgranos position when it was hit.

Nationwide

During a live election-special episode of Nationwides On the Spot on 24 May 1983, the prime minister had agreed to take questions from pre-selected members of the public sitting in BBC studios around the country. Gould had been invited after writing to the show, although her husband said later that her application had been accepted "much to her horror".

Gould said that the ship had been "on a bearing of 280 and it was already west of the Falklands". Thatcher continued to insist that the ship had represented a danger to British troops, and that the Argentine government had been warned that any ships representing a danger within a certain area were vulnerable. Gould pressed the Prime Minister several times to clarify whether the ship had been sailing away from the Falklands, but Thatcher avoided repeating that it had not. She said the full facts would be published in about 30 years, adding: "I think it could only be in Britain that a Prime Minister was accused of sinking an enemy ship that was a danger to our navy, when my main motive was to protect the boys in our navy." Denis Thatcher was said to have had a row with BBC staff, telling Roger Bolton, the programme's editor, that the BBC was run by "pinkos" and "a nest of long-haired Trots and wooftahs". The couple's daughter, Carol Thatcher, called it "an example of the most crass nastiness and discourtesy shown to a Prime Minister in an election programme". Readers of the Radio Times voted it the ninth-best interview.

Thorp report Thatcher's statement that the public would know the full facts in 30 years may have been a reference to a report she had requested from Major David Thorp, who was in charge of signals intelligence on during the war, sailing near Ascension Island.

Titled The Sinking of the Belgrano, the report has not been published, but Thorp wrote in his book The Silent Listener (2011) that General Belgrano had been ordered to sail into the exclusion zone to rendezvous with other ships, possibly for a pincer attack against the British, and not to her home port as the Argentine government claimed at the time. Thatcher had read the report, but she did not make the information public. According to the Daily Telegraph, she may not have wanted to disclose the extent of Britain's eavesdropping.