One of the sillier aspects of the Ronaldus Magnus Cult (for its origins, see here) (and of American conservatives generally the last twenty years or so has been the invocation of Sir Winston Churchill as, to paraphrase a William F. Buckley Jr title*, God and Man At Once (for SC's most egregious example, tiptoe here.)
A new book on the Reagan-Thatcher Special Relationship of the 1980s sheds light on how the whole thing got started:
One comparison in particular was continually made, from their first meeting. In April 1975, Reagan was touring Europe ahead of his first presidential run. The Labour prime minister and the foreign secretary, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, declined to see the former governor, but the new Tory leader of the opposition received him, and they took to each other. She had in tow Winston S. Churchill, M.P., Sir Winston’s grandson (and Pamela Harriman’s son), an unfortunate inheritor of a great name whose career never came to much, but who served as a useful mascot on such occasions. As Aldous notes, “Churchillian rhetoric would become a consistent and well-choreographed feature of Reagan and Thatcher’s shared public performances...”
A new book on the Reagan-Thatcher Special Relationship of the 1980s sheds light on how the whole thing got started:
One comparison in particular was continually made, from their first meeting. In April 1975, Reagan was touring Europe ahead of his first presidential run. The Labour prime minister and the foreign secretary, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, declined to see the former governor, but the new Tory leader of the opposition received him, and they took to each other. She had in tow Winston S. Churchill, M.P., Sir Winston’s grandson (and Pamela Harriman’s son), an unfortunate inheritor of a great name whose career never came to much, but who served as a useful mascot on such occasions. As Aldous notes, “Churchillian rhetoric would become a consistent and well-choreographed feature of Reagan and Thatcher’s shared public performances...”
As to the claim that Thatcher and Reagan were “even closer than Churchill and Roosevelt,” along with all those endless invocations of World War II, culminating in an exhibition of “The Art and Treasures of Winston Churchill” at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley when Thatcher was guest of honor there in 1993, Aldous points out a fine irony. It was in the very decade when Thatcher and Reagan were in power that historians began seriously to deconstruct the wartime relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt — and to show how complex and tense it had been.
A public display of amity concealed acute disagreements, inspired by widely divergent interests and even something close to mutual dislike. After all, as the historian Walter Russell Mead has written, Roosevelt was the most Anglophobic American president of the 20th century, and one of his great achievements was, in John Maynard Keynes’s phrase, to “pick out the eyes of the British Empire” economically during the war.
Funnily enough, it was Gorbachev who reminded Thatcher of what her predecessor Lord Palmerston had said: Nations have no eternal friends and no eternal foes, only eternal interests. But then she scarcely needed reminding. This was a principle she understood very well, and she was at heart no sentimentalist, even about those she fulsomely praised. As “Nico” Henderson later said (off the cuff and off the record), “If I reported to you what Mrs. Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations.”
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* God and Man At Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom" (Regnery, 1951)
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