The Thatcher-Reagan love affair wasn’t all plain sailing

Much the most entertaining item on today’s Today programme was a 31-year-old tape recording. President Ronald Reagan had rung the British prime minister in an attempt to mollify her, saying breezily: “If I were there, Margaret, I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in.” This was not a success.

In October 1983 Reagan had ordered an American invasion of Grenada, to overthrow its leftist regime after the prime minister, Maurice Bishop, had been killed in a coup. Grenada was part of the Commonwealth, and Margaret Thatcher was incensed that she had not been consulted or even given prior warning.

Behind this lies the larger story of Thatcher and Reagan. When Reagan died, Sir Harold Evans, the former Sunday Times editor, claimed that “the relationship between Thatcher and President Reagan was closer even than Churchill and Roosevelt”. Dear old Harry is a national treasure, but he doesn’t always get things quite right, as with his apparent belief that Peter Hain is one of the most important figures in the Labour party. In the words quoted, he managed to be entirely wrong, twice over.

Thatcher and Reagan first met in 1975. She had just deposed Edward Heath as Tory leader and Reagan was visiting Europe in advance of his first run for president. He wasn’t nominated by the Republicans the following year, when Jimmy Carter defeated the hapless Gerald Ford, but he was the candidate in 1980 and beat the by now also hapless Carter. Reagan was re-elected, and so for all his eight years at the White House Thatcher was at No 10, having won the 1979 election and then two more.

In 1975, when Reagan first came to London, Harold Wilson was prime minister, and he declined to see the former governor of California, but Thatcher greeted him, with Winston Churchill at her side: that is, “little Winston”, as his grandfather called him. Sir Winston’s grandson was burdened with a great name, but his career never came to much. On that occasion he was a kind of mascot, and as Richard Aldous notes in his book Reagan and Thatcher: the Difficult Relationship: “Churchillian rhetoric would become a consistent and well-choreographed feature of Reagan and Thatcher’s shared public performances.”

Difficult the relationship certainly was, as in truth had been the earlier wartime relationship. For all Evans’s rhetoric, it was precisely during the 1980s that historians began to examine the correspondence and meetings between Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt and unravel the truth. As the American historian Walter Russell Mead has written, Roosevelt was the most Anglophobic president of the 20th century.

He had disliked Churchill since they first met at a dinner in London in 1918, when FDR was under secretary of the navy and Churchill minister of munitions, and he didn’t change his mind thereafter. When they next met at Placentia Bay in August 1941 it didn’t help that Churchill had quite forgotten the earlier meeting, but Roosevelt decidedly had not. The whole story of that war was the steady eclipse of British power and the rise of the new American imperium – much helped by the way that, as Keynes put it, the Americans used the opportunity of British weakness to “pick out the eyes of the British empire” economically.

On the face of it, Thatcher’s relations with Reagan were more cordial, but she had no illusions about him. Her first foreign secretary was Lord Carrington, with whom she was talking over a drink one evening. As the conversation turned to the American president, Thatcher looked at Carrington, tapped the side of her skull, and said: “Peter, there’s nothing there.”

When the Falklands war broke out, relations for a time were very strained. One of the soi-disant intellectuals in the Reagan administration was the neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick, who wanted to keep on good terms with General Galtieri and his gang of murderers in Buenos Aires, and dined at the Argentinian embassy on the night of the invasion. The British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson, said that it was as if he had joined the Iranians for tea on the day that the Americans were taken hostage in Tehran.

What Thatcher’s detractors on the left might try to grasp is that she was far less servile in her dealings with Washington than Tony Blair. In particular, she was highly critical of American policy (or lack of it) in the Middle East, insisting that there would never be peace until justice was done to the Palestinians.

By 1989 Reagan had left the White House, and the following year Mrs T was defenestrated from Downing Street. Not long after that, “Nico” Henderson was talking to Tony Benn, and said: “If I reported to you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations.” Maybe it’s as well that Nico took that secret to the grave.