June 14, 2004, 8:13 a.m.
Ron & Maggie
Allies and friends.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the June 28, 2004, issue of National Review.

A famous left-wing poster parodied the Reagan-Thatcher alliance as a remake of Gone with the Wind, with Reagan as Rhett sweeping Maggie off her feet. The poster was adopted by its opponents and decorated many a young conservative's apartment: It conveyed, more successfully than its authors had intended, a certain romantic quality in the "special relationship" between the president and the prime minister.

Not that the relationship was romantic in the obvious sense. Mrs. Thatcher was slightly star-struck at her first meetings with ex-Governor Reagan in the mid-'70s when she was the new and uncertain leader of the Tory opposition. In her childhood she went often to a local cinema owned by family friends where she almost certainly saw Reagan in his Hollywood prime. Doubtless she was swept away twice weekly by him, as by Errol Flynn and all the other celluloid heroes of that golden age. She always liked to be surrounded by tall, well-dressed, conventionally good-looking men (that at least is the most plausible explanation for some of her ministerial appointments). And Reagan exerted in private the same charisma that made him a star on screen. It would have been second nature to him to exert it on someone with Mrs. Thatcher's Dresden-china looks and conventional ladylike manners. All this doubtless added a pleasant frisson to their first meetings — and made their subsequent political alliance a genuinely sympathetic friendship.

But the Reagan-Thatcher relationship is a romance out of Horatio Alger rather than Harlequin novels. Both were outsiders in their respective political establishments. Mrs. Thatcher was a provincial, lower-middle-class Methodist girl who lived above her father's grocery shop. She was the embodiment of provincial Methodist values — diligence, sobriety, self-reliance, charity — and her success in life and government is largely explained by that fact. But these virtues, with their slightly puritan overtones, were hardly a ticket to success in a cynical, smart, metropolitan Tory establishment that regarded the management of national decline as statesmanship. And she had to battle every inch of the way, even as prime minister, to get her colleagues to pursue policies that reflected those virtues.

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