Thatcher rebuilt Britain’s self-esteem as an international power

The death of Margaret Thatcher commits her to the ages, where in truth she has seemed to belong for many years now. Her legacy may be contested, but no one can doubt the transformative nature of her premiership, not least on the world stage.

It is hard to imagine today how low was British self- esteem when Thatcher came to power in 1979. The empire had gone. The government had just been cap-in-hand to the IMF for a loan. Television pictures had been shown around the world of a country paralysed by strikes. Streets were piled with rubbish. The dead were left unburied. Britain looked like a busted flush.

Combative rhetoric
Thatcher brought a new combative rhetoric to international affairs, constantly talking up Britain. This was hardly new, not least for Conservatives, who often looked to the example and language of Winston Churchill.

What was different, however, was that she followed through on the rhetoric.

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the conservative MP Alan Clark lamented in his diary, "We're a third world country, no good for anything."

Thatcher thought otherwise and sent a task force to the South Atlantic to retake the islands. That surprised even the United States, which had told Argentina that Britain would “huff, puff and protest, and do nothing”.

That was just one example of Thatcher standing up to Ronald Reagan in ways that have only become apparent as the documents are released.

Time and time again she confronted Reagan on policy. They disagreed about the Soviet gas pipeline, the Falklands war, the US invasion of Grenada, the "Star Wars" missile defence system, the Middle East, notably Libya and Lebanon, and how to respond to the arms control and reduction proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Sometimes she would get the better of Reagan in these disputes. The president came off sounding like “even more of a wimp than Jimmy Carter”, complained a member of his National Security Staff after one phone call during the Falklands conflict.

Political realist
But Thatcher was above all a political realist. She understood that she could push the president so far, but in the end, as the secondary power, Britain had to fall in line. Her aim was always to insert as much British policy as possible into the Washington decision-making process.

She was admired in Washington both for her toughness as the Iron Lady but also for her loyalty as an ally. It was a tricky balance, but one that she pulled off without falling into the trap of sycophancy.

The result was that by the end of the decade the two leaders, along with Mr Gorbachev, had effectively brought the cold war to its end.

That "special relationship" tipped the focus of British foreign policy away from Europe, where her Conservative predecessor Edward Heath, had put it, and back across the Atlantic. Thatcher never hid her disdain for the politics of the EU, often berating European leaders in public and private. She was, said La Stampa newspaper, "The elephant in the china shop of Europe." Thatcher would have taken that as a compliment.

That legacy of putting the "special relationship" above Europe was accepted by the Blair government after 1997 and it remains central to British politics today. If, as seems likely, Britain holds an "in-out" referendum on its membership of the European Union, Thatcher will be the central ideological figure in that debate.

Historians will have to wait that bit longer before Margaret Thatcher departs the political arena. Even in death she remains the dominant politician of the age.

Richard Aldous is the author of Reagan and Thatcher: the Difficult Relationship .