Mrs Thatcher in America
A true believer
Michael White
Washington The really alarming thing about Fleet Street's euphoric account of Mrs Thatcher's latest visit to the promised land is that it is essentially correct. Not in substance of course — her hosts drove as hard a bargain as they have been wont to do since FDR got Winston Chur- chill over a gunbarrel in 1940 — but in form, which is what matters most in Bri- tain's straitened circumstances.
They love her, honestly they do, in a way Harold Wilson can only have dreamed about. The President, sorry, 'Ron' makes a huge fuss of 'Margaret' and allows her to drag him and half the town to dinner at her embassy. Congress interupts its own ponti- ficating for half an hour to be enthralled by hers. The posh papers print more of the text than many of her own do. Breakfast television, the network news, her picture on the front page of the New York Times (two days running), she even makes the style pages of the insurgent Washington Post. Danimit, your correspondent is harangued about her Churchillian states- manship and Shakespearian prose (sic) in a restaurant, by a waiter who seems to be both black and gay. It was never like this in Shepherds Bush.
It is all the more remarkable because Mrs Thatcher breaks the ground rules of US media coverage of things British. To be reported here you must either be artistic, like Glenda Jackson, Sir David Lean or Derek Jacobi, dead, like Lord Harlech and Sir Arthur Bryant or, at the very least, dying, like the pound or the miners' strike.
Plainly Mrs Thatcher fills none of these requirements. She is sui generis. Why? Because in a Western world littered with doubt, as the irascible Mr Bernard Ingham might put it, she believes in herself. More important here, she believes in America. That is why they love her, not because she is the reliable leader of an unreliable ally, but because she believes. There cannot have been such a satisfactory foreign visi- tor since Mrs Beatrice Webb last visited Moscow, accompanied by the faithful Sidney.
Not that we are suggesting here, not for a moment, that Ronald Reagan's America is like the USSR of the great terror. The kulaks in the mid-West farm belt may be hiding from their bankers. The dominant ideology may be strident to those who are not Protestant free enterprise individualists, to Catholic Latin Americans for example. The enforced de-collectivisation of student loans and Amtrack may be proceeding apace. But no one is being rounded up and slaughtered for it, not inside this country anyway.
None of this concerned Mrs Thatcher. She had her doubts about aspects of her hosts' policies, much as Mrs Webb and the faithful Sidney (Denis makes a good Sid- ney) must have done. But she took care not to voice them in anything but the most oblique terms. Tact or the nagging fear that they would have ignored her anyway?
There was a sublime moment during Mrs Thatcher's press conference at the embassy when a journalistic conspiracy theorist of the Right asked why New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries seemed to be playing up on the nuclear issue since Mr Gorbachov's visit to London. 'What about the deal between Queen Elizabeth, Lord Peter Carrington and Mr Gorbachov?' the loony wanted to know. Mrs T. was charm itself and took pains to demolish the question. Enquiries about star wars, the dollar and US budget deficit met with less success.
Her hosts needed no advice from her, they were doing their best, she would say. Actually they are not doing their best. They are behaving with outrageous cynic- ism. There is barely a mention by them of last December's Camp David agreement which was supposed to calm European fears about 'star wars' deployment. The name of the game is now the dangled prospect of research contracts from the star wars programme. As one US official put it recently: 'The Europeans can't be bought, but they can be rented.'
And the dollar. The Prime Minister's plane was still fogbound in Washington when the President's press conference launched it, star-wars-like, even higher into orbit. But that phrase he used, about European currencies being weak because of 'the rigidities in their customs and methods of doing business', where would he have got an idea like that from?
We need not look far for a culprit. The world had already been informed that President and Prime Minister, who like
Spectator 2 March 1985 and admire each other very much (and I for one believe it), had enjoyed a cosy chat. American briefing on the chat .IS much more detailed because the senior State Department briefer has actually been present, while the British public's tenuous right-to-know, Mr Ingham, is kept at the tradesmen's entrance. Nonetheless sources say the same thing. A picture emerges. Margaret seems to have done most of the talking. Ron's voice is heard but occa- sionally. He extols the virtues of the Grace Commission on public waste, which raises a chuckle among the White House press corps since it was junked as soon as the President had endorsed its very pious pages. But the President's greatest admirer is talking on. The British economy is enjoying record levels of output, invest- ment and prosperity, everything except unemployment, she reports. If only the labour markets were more responsive and the small business culture as dynamic as her host's. They worry about cutting public spending and the welfare state mentality. 'The entitlement society' she calls it, a phrase he likes. 'You mean poor people? asks a reporter. 'No, the special interest groups,' explains the source, who is evidently not thinking about the Pentagon. We can almost hear them groaning with mutual sympathy. Then nice Mr Baker from the US Treasury intervenes to explain how difficult it is to control the dollar, much of the problem being psychological. Mrs Thatcher can readily appreciate that since she has discovered (so we are in- formed) that everyone in Washington is dying to hear her post-Gorbachov opinion of the Russian psychology. How gratifying. It was never like this at the Foreign Office. She would find much to delight her. But she would also find that the American people pay a high price for the relentless quality of their lives. There is no such thing as a free enterprise (note the `a'), as Alf Sherman would say. She would find the bureaucracy bossily to her own taste, bur, horror of horrors, like Uncle Remus's. tar baby and the post office queues, unending. She would even find astonishing gaps in the market. And since Mark was with her and is unlikely to sell any universities here (Washington has four) she may find one for him to occupy his talents filling- An export agency for British kitchen clingwrap er clings perhaps, r for the local product neither
But Thatcher in Washington is proof that infatuation with foreign utopias is not the exclusive prerogative of left-wing intel lectuals who have never served in a corn
- shop. Hers too has always been a theoretic- al passion, besides which her friend Ron, hacking his crafty way through Hollywoo.d to the star wars, is truly a son of the soil. She did have a few minutes off, plane still grounded, boxes all done. What did she do but, in the spirit of B. Webb, visit the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum? It is a marvellous place, as typical a slice ot home. What's s re s more, Tower e we rfrofe .London is of
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