Margaret Thatcher: a legacy of freedom.

• Author: O'Sullivan, John
• Pages: 57(8)

It is a great pleasure to be back at Hillsdale College, Michigan. It is some 32 years since I first visited the college for a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Those few days were an important education in American politics for me. The conference was attended by many people who had just returned from the Republican Convention at which President Ford had narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan. They were full of enthusiasm for Reagan and full of conviction that one day he would become president. Their enthusiasm--and their passion too for sound doctrine--swept me along. I think I became a firm Reaganite at that conference here in Hillsdale. And I have never had cause to regret my conversion.

I was already "a Thatcherite of the first hour", to use Gaullist terminology. Indeed, along with Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, Keith Joseph and such distinguished alumni of that Hillsdale meeting as Madsen Pirie and Stuart Butler, who went on to found the Adam Smith Institute in London in the late 1970s--well, we all have a good claim to have been Thatcherites even before Lady Thatcher. Most of the intellectual groundwork for what became Thatcherism was done in places like the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Mont Pelerin Society--and Hillsdale College.

But I have to add some words from the Lady herself when someone made the same claim in her presence: "The cock may crow, but it's the hen that lays the eggs." We couldn't have implemented those ideas of freedom without her courage, leadership, stamina and commitment to those same ideas. So it is fitting that Hillsdale College should be erecting a statue to Lady Thatcher--you were allied with her in the same cause of freedom long before she became a personal friend of the college.

I congratulate the sculptor, Bruce Wolfe, on his magnificent achievement. Not only is it a superb likeness of Lady Thatcher at the apogee of her political authority, but it also captures the extraordinary energy that she always projected--even when, as here, seated in a comfortable armchair. I will be especially nervous delivering these remarks today, feeling that Herself is seated just behind me and likely to catch me out in some error.

It is, finally, a great pleasure to be here under the gavel, so to speak, of your President Larry Arnn. I first met Larry at the dinner table in London of the late Peter Utley, a great conservative journalist, who was another Thatcherite of the first hour. While I was learning Reaganism in Hillsdale, Larry was learning Thatcherism in London, in both cases from the best possible teachers. In the end, of course, Reaganism and Thatcherism are the same Anglo-American conservative philosophy of ordered liberty applied in somewhat different national circumstances.

That is why Thatcher and Reagan were such a natural and successful partnership. They did not always look like a natural partnership, however. One acute and well-placed observer, Sir Percy Cradock, who served as Lady Thatcher's foreign policy advisor in Downing Street, pointed to some very sharp differences between them in the following contrast: "the bossy intrusive Englishwoman, lecturing and hectoring, hyperactive, obsessively concerned with detail" and "the lazy, sunny Irish ex-actor, his mind operating mainly in the instinctive mode, happy to delegate and over-delegate, hazy about most of his briefs, but with certain stubbornly held principles, a natural warmth, and an extraordinary ability to communicate with his constituents."

That sounds like criticism. And recent Reagan scholarship suggests that the president was somewhat less lazy and delegation-happy than he liked people to think. But in fact, Sir Percy was an admirer of the partnership as well as one of its close advisors. As he went on to say, these different personalities complemented each other very well. They were not oil and water, but oil and vinegar--no prizes for guessing who was which--and not entirely by accident. Both were determined to make the partnership work. Both shared the same essential philosophy. And both were prepared to back each other up in public even when they differed in private--almost all of the time, at any rate.

Winning the Cold War

Now I shall not devote this speech entirely to the Cold War partnership of Thatcher and Reagan. You know most of that story from the American end. Besides, its essence can be summed up in Lady Thatcher's own tribute to the President: "Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot." But she added a little coda too: "Not without a little help from his friends."

That summarises the truth very crisply. Reagan's friends in this cause included Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Helmut Kohl, Vaclav Havel, Italy's Francesco Cossiga...