Mrs Thatcher was his soul-mate

The Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 06/07/04 | Charles Moore

[Pokey78]

Denis, not Margaret, was the first Thatcher to notice Ronald Reagan. In 1969, he heard the then Governor of California give a stirring speech about the virtues of free enterprise to the Institute of Directors. He came home and told his wife. She remembered. And so, less than two months after becoming Conservative leader in 1975, she received Mr Reagan in London.

Because the friendship began in adversity, it was real. At that point, Mrs Thatcher was inexperienced and insecure. Ronald Reagan, for his part, was an ex-Governor not necessarily going anywhere. The adversity was not merely personal: it was also a time when conservatism was out of favour.

Politicians who said that the beliefs of a free society could and should be asserted were mistrusted. If you wanted to confront the Soviet Union, you were accused of being a warmonger. Reagan was considered stupid and maverick, Mrs Thatcher was considered ignorant and provincial. The two found that they shared beliefs - and the burden of obloquy for what they believed. That creates a bond.

In addition to the ideological affinity, President and Prime Minister actually liked one another. Lady Thatcher has a soft spot for men who are tall, smartly dressed, courtly and charming. She is particularly susceptible to a certain ease of manner which she does not herself possess.

For his part, Reagan liked what he considered a good-looking woman, with style and elegance. In Britain, Mrs Thatcher might be disparaged as a grocer's daughter. For Reagan, she epitomised what an English lady should be.

"Isn't she marvellous?" he said to an aide one day, covering the mouthpiece of the telephone as his closest ally was giving him a piece of her mind. At one dinner at our Washington embassy, an irritated Nancy had to drag him home to bed as he stayed too late talking to his British soul-mate.

It was just as well that these deep common feelings existed, because events subjected them to considerable strain. In the early 1980s, Reaganism and Thatcherism shared the common aim of liberating economic activity, but disagreed on method. She thought you had to rein in public spending; he thought you just had to cut taxes.

Funny little islands caused trouble too.

It was not written in the stars that the United States would support us over the Falklands conflict in 1982. Ironically, it was Reagan's Californians, notably Caspar Weinberger at the Pentagon, who made sure that Britain got the support we needed, while the East Coast intellectual Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the UN ambassador, was keener on placating Argentina.

In October 1983, America overthrew a Marxist coup by invading the Caribbean island of Grenada. Reagan seemed a little hurt that Margaret Thatcher failed to offer him a favour in return for the Falklands. She raged at the apparent illegality of the act and at having been kept in the dark.

Their biggest disagreement concerned the greatest area of common ground - the Cold War. It might come as a shock to CND, but Ronald Reagan genuinely disliked nuclear weapons. He had a quasi-religious fear of Armageddon. In the Strategic Defence Initiative ("Star Wars"), he thought he had hit upon a way of getting rid of the Bomb altogether.

With her much darker view of human nature, Margaret Thatcher believed in the nuclear option. She thought the Bomb could not be un-invented, and she worried that disarmament in the name of Star Wars would leave Britain vulnerable. In fact, she warmly supported SDI as a means of frightening the Russians into ending the arms race (which it did), but at Camp David in December 1984 she persuaded Reagan of four points which carefully locked the initiative into traditional deterrent policy.

Again, it was Margaret Thatcher, having met Mikhail Gorbachev before Reagan did, who persuaded the President that business could be done with the Soviet Union. But it was Margaret Thatcher who was absolutely horrified by Reagan's Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev in October 1986 in which the head of the free world appeared to offer the Soviet leader the end of all nuclear weapons. She hurried to Camp David the following month and got things back on course with a statement re-anchoring the summit in the language of normal nuclear discussions.

But Lady Thatcher is right that she and Reagan made a good team because "although we shared the same analysis of the way the world worked, we were very different people". She stood for the stern, puritanical side of conservatism - the need to brace up and take the medicine. He stood for the optimistic, open, deeply American side of it - the idea that everything will be all right if only people are trusted to get on with their lives. Mix the two, and you harness the Special Relationship, for the first time in history, to the march of conservative ideas.

Each complemented and learnt from the other. He was emboldened to take on the air traffic controllers in 1981 by the tough example she was setting with the unions. She broke with traditional Foreign Office suspicion of dissidents to back Reagan's crusade for human rights in the Soviet bloc and create a doctrine determined to set the oppressed free. His own Republicans so admired her that her support for his détente would help bring them along, while he did his bit for her domestic politics by arranging to snub her Labour opponent, Neil Kinnock. With Nato allies in Europe, Reagan's closeness to her gave her an authority that she put to good use, while she gave him the bridgehead he needed, whether to bomb Libya or counter Continental defeatism.

They really did work together to make the world a freer place, and both survived long enough in office to see it happening.

At Friday's service at Washington National Cathedral, Margaret Thatcher's words of tribute to Ronald Reagan will not be delivered in person, but played on tape, in deference to her health. They have been endlessly rehearsed. But never will a tribute by one statesman to another have come more directly from the heart.

[Cedar]

I've always been interested in Thatcher. Good article, thanks.