Winning the Cold War

John O’Sullivan has done much more with this book than provide three potted biographies; he has laid out a compelling account of how the Cold War was won, furnished us with a manual of political leadership and told us the inner secrets of a love story.

At the heart of this story of the Eighties, a decade O’Sullivan rightly champions, is the remarkable relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The strength of their bond was at the time regarded as semi-scandalous, a betrayal by the British Prime Minister of her first loyalty, to her country, in favour of a wild ideological fling.

For those of us who were undergraduates when both were in power one of the trials of university life was finding one particular poster in all too many student bedrooms. It depicted Reagan as Rhett Butler and Thatcher as Scarlett O’Hara above the words, ‘She promised to follow him to the end of the earth, he promised to arrange it.’

As O’Sullivan shows, there was certainly a level of understanding and affection between Thatcher and Reagan which has rarely been replicated between heads of government. It sprang from a shared set of principles, the knowledge that both had won their positions by running as insurgents against the establishment and a mutual respect for the resolution both had to display in defence of their ideals. Their relationship was tested during the Eighties, as both came under domestic and international pressure. And, despite the poster caricature, there were differences.

But, as O’Sullivan reminds us, the principle disagreements between Thatcher and Reagan sprang not from Thatcher’s determination to break free from White House ‘dogmatism’, but were the product of her concern that Reagan was at times insufficiently vigorous or rigorous in upholding principled Conservative positions.