She achieved as good a settlement as could be hoped for in Hong Kong. She defied the world by pursuing her own route to ending apartheid in South Africa and arguably was vindicated by the result. And despite her strongly expressed views, she managed to maintain good relations with almost everyone, not only the leaders of both superpowers, but on both sides of the Jordan and the Limpopo too. In short, one recent history concludes, she ‘utterly transformed Britain’s standing and reputation in the world’.11
Ron and Margaret
The unshakeable cornerstone of Mrs Thatcher’s foreign policy was the United States. She had no time for subtle formulations which saw Britain as the meeting point of overlapping circles of influence, maintaining a careful equidistance between America on the one hand and Europe on the other, with obligations to the Commonwealth somewhere in the background. She had no doubt whatever that Britain’s primary role in the world was as Washington’s number-one ally. No Prime Minister since Churchill had believed so unquestioningly in the mission of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ to lead and save the rest of the world. But she had no illusions about who was the senior partner, nor did she seek to deny the reality of British dependence on the United States. It was the Americans – with British help – who had liberated Europe from the Nazi tyranny in 1944; it was American nuclear protection which had defended Western Europe from Soviet aggression since 1945. ‘Had it not been for the magnanimity of the United States, Europe would not be free today,’ she reminded the Tory Party Conference in 1981 (and repeated on innumerable other occasions). ‘We cannot defend ourselves, either in this island or in Europe, without a close, effective and warmhearted alliance with the United States.’12
Moreover, she increasingly believed that it was not just America’s military might that underwrote the survival of freedom in the West, but American capitalism, which was the pre-eminent model of that freedom. Nothing made her angrier than the condescension of the British political establishment which viewed America as crude, refreshingly vigorous but sadly naive. She envied the energy and optimism of American society – the unapologetic belief in capitalism and the refusal to look to the state for the solution to every social problem – and wanted Britain to become in every respect (from penal policy to the funding of the arts) more American. She was herself, as one US Ambassador in London shrewdly noted, a very American type of politician: patriotic, evangelical, unafraid of big abstract words, preaching a message of national and even personal salvation quite unlike the usual British (and European) style of ironic scepticism and fatalistic damage limitation.13 Proud as she was of Britain’s glorious past, at the end of the twentieth century a part of her would really rather have been American. Her entourage felt the almost physical charge she got whenever she visited America. ‘When she stepped onto American soil she became a new woman,’ Ronnie Millar noted. ‘She loved America… and America loved her back. There is nothing like the chemistry of mutual admiration.’14
She was distressed and angered by the overt anti-Americanism of British liberals who professed to see little difference between the Americans and the Russians, or nuclear disarmers who painted the United States as a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union. There was no group she more passionately despised than academics who abused their personal freedom by equating Tyranny and Freedom. Her world view was uncomplicatedly black and white. ‘This party is pro-American,’ she declared roundly at the 1984 Tory Party Conference.15 Whatever differences she might have with the Americans on specific issues, she was determined to demonstrate on every occasion Britain’s unqualified loyalty to the Atlantic alliance. If she could not be the leader of the free world herself, the next best thing was to be his first lieutenant.
Just as she was lucky in her enemies, Mrs Thatcher was extraordinarily fortunate to coincide for most of her eleven years in Downing Street with an American President who allowed her to play a bigger role within the Alliance than any other Prime Minister since the days of Roosevelt and Churchill. During her first year and a half in office she tried hard to cultivate a good relationship with Jimmy Carter. Deeply as she revered his office, however, she enjoyed no rapport with the well-meaning but in her view hopelessly woolly-minded Democrat. The election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980, by contrast, changed everything. It was not just that Reagan was an ideological soulmate, elected on the same sort of conservative backlash that had brought her to power in Britain. Ideological symmetry does not guarantee a good relationship: it can just as easily make for rivalry. Far more important than the similarity of their ideas was the difference in their political personalities.
Temperamentally Reagan was Mrs Thatcher’s opposite, an easygoing, broad-brush politician who made no pretence of mastering the detailed complexities of policy, but was happy to let others – including on occasion Mrs Thatcher – lead and even bully him. The bond of their instinctively shared values was reinforced by sexual chemistry: he had an old-fashioned gallantry towards women, while she had a weakness for tall, charming men (particularly older men) with film-star looks. Out of his depth with most foreign leaders, Reagan knew where he was with Mrs Thatcher, if only because she spoke his language: he understood her, liked her, admired her and therefore trusted her. Unlike Helmut Schmidt, he did not feel threatened in his ‘male pride’ by a strong woman: as Americans often remarked, Margaret Thatcher held no terrors for a man who had been married for thirty years to Nancy Davis. For a politician, Reagan was unusually secure in his own skin. Unlike Mrs Thatcher he did not have to win every argument: he knew what he believed, but shrank from confrontation. Once when she was hectoring him down the telephone from London, he held the receiver away from his ear so that everyone in the room could hear her in full flow, beamed broadly and announced: ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’16 Their contrasting styles served to disguise the disparity in power between Washington and London and for eight years made something approaching reality of the comforting myth of a ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States.
Mrs Thatcher exploited her opportunity with great skill – and uncharacteristic tact. Privately she was clear- sighted about the President’s limitations. ‘If I told you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan it would damage Anglo-American relations,’ Nicholas Henderson told Tony Benn some years later.17 ‘Not much grey matter, is there?’ she once reflected.18 But she would never hear a word of criticism from others. In Reagan she put up with a bumbling ignorance she would have tolerated in no one else, partly because he was the President and leader of the free world, but also because she realised that his amiable vagueness gave her a chance to influence American policy that no conventionally hands-on President would have allowed her – as was quickly demonstrated when Reagan was succeeded by George Bush.
The basis of their partnership was laid back in 1975, when Mrs Thatcher was a newly elected Leader of the Opposition and the ex-Governor of California was just beginning to be talked of as a Presidential candidate. They had immediately found themselves on the same wavelength, and in due course each was delighted by the other’s election.Yet their relationship in office took a little time to develop. By no coincidence Mrs Thatcher was the first major foreign visitor to Washington after Reagan’s inauguration. She stated her position unambiguously at the welcoming ceremony on the White House lawn: ‘We in Britain stand with you…Your problems will be our problems, and when you look for friends we will be there.’ Reagan responded in kind. ‘In a dangerous world,’ he asserted, there was ‘one element that goes without question: Britain and America stand side by side.’19
But this was the conventional rhetoric of these occasions. At this stage the two leaders were still addressing each other formally on paper as ‘Dear Mr President… Dear Madame Prime Minister’.20 Their working partnership really began at the Ottawa G7 in July 1981. This was Reagan’s first appearance on the global stage, while she was now relatively experienced: he was grateful for her support, both personal and political. She chaperoned and protected him, and made the case for American policy more effectively than he could, on the one hand for market solutions to the world recession against most of the other leaders who favoured more interventionist measures; and on the other in standing firm in support of the deployment of cruise missiles, from which the Europeans – faced with anti-nuclear demonstrations – were beginning to retreat. At the same time she warned Reagan privately that American criticism of European ‘neutralism’ risked provoking exactly the reaction it sought to prevent.21
Afterwards Reagan wrote to her for the first time as ‘Dear Margaret’, thanking her for her ‘important role in our discussions. We might still be drafting the communique if it were not for you.’ She in return addressed him for the first time as ‘Dear Ron’.22 Nine months later the Falklands crisis caused a temporary hiccup; but after some initial hesitation Reagan gave Britain the full support Mrs Thatcher felt entitled to expect. Arrangements had already been made for Reagan to visit London after the Versailles summit in June 1982. The trip had been planned at the nadir of Mrs Thatcher’s domestic unpopularity to lend support to an embattled ally; in the event it
