Agreeing to differ

‘Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love.’ The ballad has many variant versions but the denouement is always the same; he was her man and he did her wrong. Rooty-toot-toot three times she shoot, and Johnny ended up in a coffin.

Thatcher and Reagan were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love. But Reagan did her wrong: over Grenada, over nuclear disarmament, as near as nothing over the Falklands. The relationship was to end in ostentatious affection, but if Mrs Thatcher had had a gun in that celebrated handbag, it might have been a case of rooty-toot-toot all over again.

Richard Aldous claims, or, at least, lets the blurb make him claim, that ‘the weakest link in the Atlantic Alliance of the 1980s was the association between its two principal actors.’ His intelligent, authoritative and extremely readable book does not bear this out. What it shows is that, whether you are talking about Churchill and Roosevelt, Adenauer and De Gaulle, Thatcher and Reagan or any other pair of international statesmen, what counts in the end is not personal liking or ideological rapport but the national interest. If Reagan felt that the interests of the United States required a certain course of action, then that course would be taken: it might be dressed up slightly to accommodate the needs of a friend but essentially it would be unchanged.

This became painfully clear to Thatcher when the Americans invaded Grenada in 1983. A left-wing coup in the tiny Caribbean island seemed to threaten the establishment of another Cuba on the United States’ doorstep. Grenada was an independent country and a member of the Commonwealth. Britain was disturbed by this development but did not take it very seriously.