Margaret Thatcher dies: Thatcher and Reagan's shared agenda

Early on, before I was Secretary of State, President Reagan sent me to go around to the heads of government of the various countries in the then G7 to tell them what he had on his mind. Mrs Thatcher asked me to come out to Chequers, and she also invited the ambassador and a whole bunch of other people to a lunch at one o’clock. But she quietly invited me to come at 11am.

She had heard that Reagan wanted to get her views, unfiltered, through me.

So the embassy car came to take me, and in the car was a very able young man who I think was economic counsellor. When we got up to Chequers, there was the Prime Minister standing in the doorway. It was quite a sight.

I introduced this young man who was with me and she said, ‘Well, he’s here to take notes, isn’t he?’ Then she turned to him and she said, ‘Have you ever had a good tour of Chequers?’ He was nervous by this time and said, ‘No, Prime Minister.’ She had an aide with her and turned to him and said, ‘Take him on a tour of Chequers.’ Then she took my arm and wheeled me into a little room with a fireplace and we sat there for two hours, nobody else in the room.

Back and forth we went. She liked that; she didn’t like lap dogs. I was really very impressed and I got a very clear understanding of her view of things, and I gave her Reagan’s.

This was the era of detente, which said, ‘We’re here and they’re there, that’s life, the name of the game is getting along.’ Both Reagan and Thatcher rejected that view. They thought, ‘We’re both here but their situation is not stable. They’re going to change.’ Your policies will be different depending on whether you think the other side is there permanently or whether you think things can change. It was a very important conceptual point.

They were both politicians of the same stripe. A lot of politicians are what I call process politicians. They’re really good, they know how to get something done but they really don’t care very much about what it is. They just enjoy the process.

But agenda politicians are in the arena because they have issues that they want to have an impact on, they are people who really get something important accomplished. Reagan and Thatcher were both agenda politicians.

When they entered office, the Cold War was as cold as it could get. When they left, it was all over bar the shouting.

George Shultz was US Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989.