At her death on April 8, 2013, she was the Right Honorable Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC, but at her birth on Oct. 13, 1925 — 98 years ago today — she was Margaret Roberts of Grantham, a market and industrial town (current population about 45,000) in Lincolnshire, England. Her beloved father, Alfred, was a grocer, by all accounts intelligent and civic-minded and respected by everyone, who, in addition to being a Wesleyan lay preacher, served as an alderman and, briefly, as the town’s mayor; a local librarian would later describe him as “the most well-read man in Grantham.” He was active in Rotary, the international humanitarian organization, and Margaret would later say, as her official biographer, Charles Moore, puts it, “that her family had first realized that there was something wrong with Hitler ‘when we heard that he had suppressed Rotary.’” 

The Roberts family was lower-middle class and had to struggle to get by; Margaret, like her mother and sister, worked in the grocery, and the family habit of scrimping and saving bred in her a lifetime of thrift. Despite their lack of wealth, however, as Moore has written, the Robertses “saw it as their duty to help in a small and discreet way where they found distress.” Hence, Margaret would take some of her mother’s baked goods to neighbors and present them with these gifts in such a way as not to diminish their pride. Later, during her years in government, when Thatcher still had to be careful with money, she had a widowed neighbor, Sue Mastriforte, to whom she would give “food and other objects” as well as the occasional small sum of cash. “She also arranged to pay her to do some of her shopping and look after her house,” reports Moore. “It was Sue Mastriforte, for example, who bought material in a Harrods sale out of which Mrs. Thatcher had a dress made for her [first] visit to America” when she was a newly elected member of the House of Commons.

You will notice that I am quoting Moore over and over again. This is because I have just finished reading his three-volume biography of Thatcher. I have taken my time with it; in fact, I have savored it. I bought it two years ago this month, and it has been my back-burner book ever since. I have read it, a few pages at a time, on buses and trains and the like, squeezing it in as a guilty pleasure between my obligatory reading. In my lifetime, I’ve read a great deal more than my share of biographies, mostly political and literary, but I’ve never encountered one that was better written, or that impressed me more with its seriousness, intelligence, and thoroughness; and I’ve never read one whose subject, admired by me at the start, soared even more greatly in my estimation over the course of the book. Hence this article — which, I confess at the outset, is mostly a tidied-up collection of my notes on Moore’s superb triptych, plus a few tidbits that I encountered elsewhere. 

You might expect me to focus on the many monumental international and domestic issues that confronted Thatcher during her prime ministership. But given that I read Moore’s book during the presidency of Joe Biden, it was impossible not to be immensely impressed, again and again, by the staggering contrast between the current president — an embodiment of mediocrity, pettiness, perfidy, degeneracy, and authoritarianism (attributes that he shares, alas, with many others who have wielded power in the U.S. and Britain in recent years) — and Margaret Thatcher, whose character traits, which I daresay were, taken for all in all, nothing less than sterling, made her the very model of a great leader of a free nation. It is striking to ponder the way in which Barack Obama, for all his own deceitfulness and treachery, was (and is) treated by the mainstream media as some kind of golden god — so splendiferous that he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize just for being himself — whereas Thatcher, a truly noble figure, was demonized in her own time, denied an honorary degree by her own alma mater (Oxford), and continues to be besmirched today, despite having given such extraordinary service to her country, and the entire free world, and having done it throughout with remarkable courage, decency, integrity, selflessness, patriotism, and love of liberty.

Where to start? When Thatcher is the subject, the answer must be God. Margaret Roberts was brought up in the Methodist Church, and, as Moore writes, she “never repudiated the Methodism of her childhood, with its reverence for truth-telling, hard work and putting into practice the teaching of Scripture.” She would later say that “[a]s a Methodist in Grantham, I learnt the laws of God. When I read chemistry at Oxford, I learnt the laws of science, which derive from the laws of God, and when I studied for the Bar, I learnt the laws of man.” Notes Moore, “She always had very strong personal Christian beliefs, in what [ecclesiastical historian] Edward Norman called ‘the English sense’” — meaning that “she was not interested in spirituality, sacraments or questions of authority in the Church, but she was extremely interested in duty to God and in ethics.” 

During her entire time in the House of Commons, the constituency she represented was Finchley, a small city north of London with a disproportionately large Jewish population. As she got to know the locals, she developed, in Moore’s words, “a strong admiration for Jewish values,” including scholarship, citizenship, entrepreneurship, and a “sense of community.” As prime minister, as it happens, “she was often closer to Jewish religious leaders … than to Christian ones.” And as she admired Jews, so too she admired Israel; visiting it in 1965, she “admired the purposeful activity everywhere” and was confirmed in her lifelong and incredibly unfashionable feeling “that Israel was a good country which wanted peace with its neighbours.” Of all the members of her political inner circle, her very favorite was Keith Joseph, who was Jewish, and whom she described as “the most sensitive human being I have ever met in forty years of politics”; and although her position as prime minister brought her into regular contact with the bishops of the Anglican Church, her “favourite religious leader” in Britain was the country’s chief rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits. 

One aspect of her very real Christian faith was her almost entirely consistent kindness toward her fellowmen, both high and low. When she began to be involved in politics, those who met her were struck by her “perfect manners.” (In retirement, as a guest in other people’s homes around the world, Thatcher still “showed excellent manners, particularly to staff, and wrote memorably nice thank-you letters.”) In 1967, traveling to the U.S. for the first time as the guest of a State Department exchange program, she gave speeches around the country — visiting Washington, Wilmington, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Omaha, Chicago, Boston, and New York (her itinerary, which reads like an impossibly grueling book-tour schedule, can be found online) — and everywhere she won rave reviews for her personal qualities. One of her hosts wrote to the U.S. Embassy in London that she was “undoubtedly one of the most delightful and competent visitors we have had” and had “charmed and impressed local sponsors from coast to coast”; in San Francisco she was judged “extremely charming”; in New York, those who attended her speech were “charmed not only by [her] good looks but her very brilliant talk” and “could hardly bear to part with her.” In return, “she loved virtually every moment of her trip…. She enjoyed American courtesy, American warmth and American technology, business know-how and political culture.” Her love for America would last a lifetime. 

By contrast, she was not above taking little digs at the French, whose underperformance in World War II she had never quite forgiven (“the women of Britain … do wonderful voluntary work — not like French women”). And for obvious historical reasons, she could barely disguise her animus toward the Germans. Moore quotes William Waldegrave, one of her Cabinet members, as saying that “she didn’t really like the Germans, and neither did Denis” (her husband, who had been an officer in the British Army during the war and was awarded an MBE for his service). Consequently, Thatcher “could be moved to tears by the plight of the Poles under Communism, less so by that of the East Germans.” Watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV, she “was ‘appalled’ to see the Bundestag singing ‘Deutschland über Alles,’ which she called ‘a dagger in my heart.’” And when German chancellor Helmut Kohl “gloated” after the 1990 World Cup “that the Germans had beaten the English at their national game,” she “shot back that the English had beaten the Germans at theirs twice in the twentieth century.”

Then there were the Soviets. During her first year in office, the Foreign Office presented her with a report entitled Managing Russia. Thatcher, who was routinely “infuriated” by “Foreign Office timidity,” hated the very title: “She didn’t want to ‘manage’ the Soviet Union … but to defeat it.” She was as suspicious of the Kremlin as Reagan was and believed even more firmly in the importance of a strong nuclear deterrent, but this firmness — which led the Soviet publication Red Star to dub her the “Iron Lady” — lent her credibility when she finally decided that Mikhail Gorbachev was sincere in his reforms and deserved Western moral support. “Mrs. Thatcher,” explains Moore, “had a quality, surprisingly unusual in political leaders, of being extremely interested in the matter of many issues, rather than seeing them only as instrumental to political success…. She would immerse herself in the detail…. She studied Gorbachev’s reforms in this way.” 

And Gorbachev knew it: he “was more honest with her than with other world leaders, because he knew ‘he couldn’t put anything over on her.’” Richard Nixon, who viewed Gorbachev as “formidable,” wrote that Thatcher was that rare Western leader who could go “toe-to-toe” with him. When she first visited Moscow, Anatoly Chernyaev, a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, found her “beautiful, extraordinary, feminine,” adding: “It’s not true that she’s a woman with balls, or a man in a skirt. She is a woman through and through, and what a woman!” After she had visited Moscow and given a brilliant interview on Soviet TV, a Soviet contact of her longtime foreign policy adviser, Charles Powell, described her as “far and away the most popular figure in the Soviet Union.” Boris Yeltsin appreciated her, too: when the August 1991 military coup occurred, she phoned him at once, asked what she could do, and publicly condemned the plotters — well before George H.W. Bush, who by then had assumed the U.S. presidency, did so. Her passionate references to the captive peoples behind the Iron Curtain weren’t just empty rhetoric: when, after her retirement, she founded the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, its initial intention was to help educate future entrepreneurs in the former Warsaw Pact countries. 

Yes, there were those who despised Thatcher from afar. But in one case after another, to meet her was to succumb to her charms. One of those who didn’t fall for her, to be sure, was Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, who, after having her over for dinner, described her as “a vulgar fishwife.” Now, “fishwife,” means “a coarse-mannered, vulgar-tongued woman”; Thatcher, whatever other fault you might have found with her, was the very opposite of coarse-mannered or vulgar-tongued. As for simply “vulgar,” well, yes, Graham had been born into great wealth (her father was chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the family owned several homes around the U.S.), and she came by her massive political influence by inheriting the Post after her husband’s suicide; compared to her, Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, was indeed, by definition, vulgar — a member of what Hillary Clinton would later call the “basket of deplorables.” But low-born though she was, she certainly won Henry Kissinger over: “I was always very taken with her. You could say she seduced me.” He wasn’t alone: many of the intellectuals who found their way into her company “fell in love” with her, according to Moore. Her Parliamentary private secretary Ian Gow said, “I shall love her … ’till the day I die.” Philip Larkin (who was one of her favorite poets) was a fan, too: “Very few people,” he said, “are both right and beautiful.” 

And she earned that love. While she could be fierce in battle on the floor of the Commons, she treated her underlings with unwavering respect and affection. “She was exceptional with every member of her staff, however junior,” testified one of them, Tory MP Richard Ryder. “It was the happiest office in which I have ever worked.” After becoming head of government, she “quickly established a mixture of formality” at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country manor house, “with friendliness towards those working for her.” When, in October of 1984, a bomb went off at the Brighton hotel at which she was staying during the annual Conservative Party conference, the party chair, John Gummer, found her “on her hands and knees. Shoeless.” But while her husband, Denis, was “shaken,” she was “calm and composed”; her concern was not for herself but for her staff: “Are you all right, dears?” she asked. Comforting a typist who was crying, she said, “Don’t worry, dear.” And when security officials urged her to return at once to 10 Downing Street, she replied, “I’m not leaving.” The conference went on as scheduled. Similarly, when Gow was killed in 1990 by an IRA car bomb, she was bereft. “It was the only time,” writes Moore, that Powell “ever saw her completely break down, weeping uncontrollably. She travelled at once to Sussex to comfort Gow’s widow, Jane,” and “stayed for an impromptu communion in the nearby church that evening.” 

I’ve mentioned Denis, who, before retiring in 1994, had a successful business career. Thatcher haters enjoyed imagining that the marriage was unhappy and that Denis was jealous of his wife’s position, but those who were close to them knew that this couldn’t be further from the truth: Mastriforte described them as “a very close couple” and said that Margaret’s selection as Conservative Party leader made him “ten feet tall with pride.” Diane Thatcher, the ex-wife of the Thatchers’ son, Mark, told Moore that Denis “was always the quintessential English gentleman — old-school and chivalrous. He was fiercely loyal to his wife…. She willingly deferred to him in private, because she knew that he would never give her reason to distrust him.” Moore, who knew both Margaret and Denis quite well, writes that Denis, possessing “a shrewdness she sometimes lacked,” understood his wife “better than she understood herself,” but despite his own “strong interest in politics and strong opinions … recognized that he must not interfere.” 

If Thatcher’s enemies enjoyed thinking the worst about her marriage, they also conjured images of rivalry between her and Queen Elizabeth II. The head of government was just over six months older than the head of state, and over the years, and even after Thatcher’s death, much was made (in the series The Crown, for example) of their divergent views on, for example, the Commonwealth. But the facts suggest otherwise. After going to Buckingham Palace for her penultimate audience with the Queen, Thatcher returned to 10 Downing Street and went straight to the loo, where she wept. “It’s when people are kind to you that you feel it most,” she explained. “The Queen has been so kind to me.” It was the Queen herself who decided to award Thatcher the Order of Merit, one of the very few honors that are entirely within the purview of the monarch to dispense, and who, shortly afterward, made Denis a hereditary baronet so that the title could be passed on to the Thatchers’ son, Mark; this wouldn’t have been possible if the Queen had simply chosen to make Thatcher a dame. (Thatcher later became Lady Thatcher in her own right when she entered the House of Lords with a life peerage.) 

On top of all this, the Queen, during Thatcher’s retirement, attended her 70th and 80th birthday parties — an utter break with tradition — and at the latter strolled among the guests with Thatcher as if they were the closest of friends. When Thatcher’s death was imminent, the Queen made it clear that she meant to attend, which sparked talk of a state funeral. Thatcher herself quashed that notion. “That was for Winston,” she said, meaning, as Moore puts it, that she considered such a sendoff “too exalted for her.” That humility was utterly in character. Yes, Thatcher was fiercely ambitious, but not for money or fame or immortality; she wanted power only so that she could do the things that she thought needed to be done to improve the British economy and serve the cause of freedom in the world. 

Some random notes about her personality, habits, tastes. Even when she was living at 10 Downing Street, she invariably had dinner waiting for Denis when he came home from work and would even happily prepare meals for her (all-male) Cabinet. Her favorite book as a child was A Tale of Two Cities. When asked to choose a “historical hero” for a BBC program, she named the 19th-century scientist Michael Faraday, who illuminated the phenomenon of electromagnetism. (“I admired his total fascination with the subject; his total singleness of purpose, because it is of such men that Britain’s reputation in the scientific world has been built.”) She loved the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: “I always wished I could have danced like her.” Once, when asked what figure from history she would like to have been, she chose Anna Leonowens, the governess immortalized in The King and I. (In the 2011 biopic The Iron Lady, a young Margaret Roberts and Denis Thatcher are shown watching that movie at a cinema.) She was fond of the great American songbook, one of her favorite standards being “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

While the London cultural elites cherished the notion of her as a philistine, she loved the opera and was extraordinarily knowledgeable about it. She loved classical music, her most beloved composers including Bartok, Beethoven, and Dvorak. She loved Whitman, Longfellow, and T.S. Eliot, too, and knew innumerable poems by heart. (Hymns, too: Moore records that when Denis died in 2003, “her anguish and mental confusion were such that she was not sure whether it was her husband’s or her father’s coffin in front of her,” but even so “she was seen to sing all the hymns, word perfect, without looking at the service sheet.”) At the top of her list of poets was Kipling, and in 1976 her “holiday reading” was his collected poems (“all 845” of them). When she was asked during her premiership for a list of her “desert island books,” her choices included John Wesley’s sermons, Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, biographies of Wellington and Disraeli, and Samuel Pepys’ diary. 

She didn’t care “what history might say about her” and, hence, wasn’t the kind of politician (or author) who carefully saves every scrap of paper for her archives; on the contrary, she “was one of those tidy people who get a positive pleasure from throwing things away.” Vacations? She “always disliked them” because “she did not know what to do with them.” (She and Denis once cut off a 10-day trip to Corsica after four days.) She loved pretty clothing and nice furnishings but was the very opposite of extravagant. Her thrift is illustrated by a passing mention in Moore’s book of how, at the airport in the Bahamas after a 1985 Commonwealth summit, she ducked into duty free to purchase gin and cigarettes for Denis. A brief anecdote from “early in her first administration” also speaks volumes about her fiscal prudence: when “she discovered that one of the ministerial flats in Admiralty House, vacant at the time, had several good bits of government furniture,” Thatcher “procured the key and personally led a party … to the flat” and returned with “pictures, chairs and so on.”

Like Reagan, Thatcher was severely condemned for her purported indifference to the AIDS crisis. But as with so much else, this was a case of left-wingers using a mass-scale human tragedy to demonize a political opponent. Yes, during the 1980s there was a great deal of anti-gay moralizing about AIDS. But, as Moore writes, “there is no recorded incident of her expressing a view about the strictly moral” aspects of gays contracting AIDS: “Her main concern, as so often, was to establish what the facts were. ‘She did believe in evidence: she was a scientist,’ recalled Mark Addison, and the problem with AIDS at this time [i.e., early on in the epidemic] was that ‘Nobody knew what would happen.’” Granted, she was put off by a draft advertisement on “Risky Sex” that mentioned anal intercourse, for fear that it would, as Moore writes, “put into the minds of young people sexual activities which might not otherwise, in that pre-internet age, have occurred to them, thus encouraging the very practice it sought to reduce.” But “[a]fter reading and carefully marking an article in [the medical journal] the Lancet which set out all the risky practices in detail, Mrs. Thatcher reluctantly agreed to the advertisements, with a few changes.” 

Yes, it’s true that Thatcher, in Moore’s words, “treated the subject of AIDS” in a “gingerly” fashion. But as a woman who “was always moved by dramatic examples of human suffering,” Thatcher “eventually decided that she did want to meet its victims.” In August 1989, then, without publicity (she didn’t want anybody to think she was competing with Princess Diana), she visited a London hospital, where she met two young male patients who were dying of AIDS. Her private secretary, Caroline Slocock, who accompanied her, later described her as “connecting in a simple and genuine way” and as “com[ing] across more as a mother than a Prime Minister, and a sympathetic one at that.” Thatcher, recalled Slocock, behaved “as if she has all the time in the world.” One of the two patients was an American who was experiencing delusions (he wasn’t sure at first that Thatcher wasn’t a hallucination), and Thatcher, in Slocock’s present-tense account, “places her hand on his arm, asks him a few questions about his life and listens, in a way that demonstrates that she … is there because she cares and wishes him well. He calms down in response. It is simple, human stuff, but I am in awe of it.” Later that day, Thatcher wrote a letter of thanks to the hospital and enclosed a personal check in the amount of £1000. None of it ever made the papers. 

In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on the head of Salman Rushdie, a British subject, because his novel The Satanic Verses was viewed as offensive to Islam. Rushdie despised Thatcher and had savaged her in his work, but while left-wing politicians, writers, and artists around the world divided as to whether they should support Rushdie’s freedom of speech or take the side of the third-world people of color whom he had supposedly offended, Thatcher did not hesitate to stand up for him. After her death, Rusdhie admitted that on the single occasion when they met, she was “very considerate, and, surprisingly, touchy-feely.… She would tap you on the arm and say, ‘Everything OK?’ I hadn’t expected that touch of tenderness.” Yes, she was aware of what he’d written about her. But that didn’t matter. In her view, it wasn’t about her, and it wasn’t about Rushdie. It was about what she considered to be fundamental British freedoms. As F.W. de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, said by way of explaining why he placed her at the very top of his list of world leaders, “She was principled.”

Few of her contemporaries, of course, admired Thatcher more than Ronald Reagan. And of course the admiration was mutual. The first person to mention her to Reagan might have been his friend and “kitchen Cabinet” member Justin Dart, who told him in 1975, “Ronnie, you’ve got to meet her … she’s terrific.” When they did meet soon thereafter in London, recalled Thatcher, “I was immediately won over by his charm, directness and sense of humor.” Reagan, for his part, said, “It was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding freedom.” After that initial meeting, according to Reagan aide Michael Deaver, “Reagan was still going on and on about this wonderful woman he’d met.” When she became prime minister, Reagan was “[t]he first foreign politician” to phone to congratulate her — but since he wasn’t yet president, the call wasn’t put through. No, the man in the Oval Office at that moment was still Jimmy Carter, who met with Thatcher early in her premiership. A staffer of the National Security Council who attended that meeting later said, “In that room was one giant … and the giant was female.”

The day after Reagan’s own inauguration as president, Thatcher phoned. “We’ll lend strength to each other,” he said. “We will,” she replied. Reagan’s first state dinner honored Thatcher. He wrote in his diary, “Truly a warm & beautiful occasion.” Their temperaments, writes Moore, were “utterly different” but “compatible.” To Reagan, she had all “the elegance of a typical, gracious English lady”; Thatcher, for her part, “liked Reagan for his gentlemanly charm, his courtesy to her as a woman, but above all because he inspired her trust. In her mind, there was no greater virtue than trust.” At their first summit with other Western leaders, “only she stood up for him” when he outlined his economic views: “After dinner, he caught up with her to express his thanks. As he told the story, ‘she leaned over to me and patted my elbow and said, ‘Don’t worry, Ronnie, it’s just boys being boys.’” In his diary that evening, he called her “a tower of strength.” Her own private take: “The President was wonderful.” In September 1983 came an Oval Office tête-à-tête. She was “royally received,” and Reagan wrote in his diary, “I don’t think US-UK relations have ever been better.”

Yes, there were dark moments. Thatcher was disappointed in 1983 when Reagan invaded Grenada, a Commonwealth nation, without clearing it beforehand with her. “My relations with President Reagan,” she lamented, “will never be the same again.” In fact, those relations recovered quickly. The next year, during the U.K. miners’ strike, “President Reagan took the step, highly unusual in an ally’s purely domestic political difficulty, of writing to Mrs. Thatcher” to offer his moral support. She returned the favor during the Iran-Contra scandal of 1985-87, during which Reagan endured a great deal of domestic and international criticism but received nothing but words of comfort and loyalty from Thatcher, who always felt morally bound to stand up for friends in times of adversity. 

Then there was the matter of Laker Airways, a British company that might have been prosecuted in the U.S. for major financial irregularities if not for Reagan’s concern about upsetting Thatcher. As he told his Cabinet: “We don’t have any friends better than Margaret Thatcher. If this is important to her, even I, as a law and order man, am not going to proceed, in the interests of US national security.” The strong Reagan-Thatcher friendship also assured that when Argentina attacked the Falkland Islands in 1982, there was no question but that the U.S., despite fierce protests from many officials in the State Department, would fully support the U.K. Several years after the Falklands War, when some White House staffers urgently wished to sell arms to Argentina as a signal of support for its now-burgeoning democracy, Reagan said no, because Thatcher was deeply opposed to any such sale. 

There were many aspects of the Reagan-Thatcher relationship that were almost entirely without precedent. Thatcher routinely wrote long letters to him. This, Moore points out, was “unique.” Also unusual was that, according to White House officials, “Reagan would always read her messages in full rather than relying on a precis, as he did with most other correspondents.” After a state dinner in February 1985, “Ronald and Nancy Reagan insisted on attending” the subsequent dinner at the British Embassy, “ignoring the general rule that the President did not dine out at foreign embassies. They were keen to come because, as [Reagan staffer Robert] McFarlane put it, ‘This was family. That’s the way he felt about it. Mrs. Reagan too. They liked Denis. They liked the Prime Minister.’” During that visit, Thatcher went on Face the Nation and chided the host, Lesley Stahl, for her negativity: “America is a strong country with a great president, a great people and a great future.… Why are you doing your level best to put the worst foot forward?… I beg of you, you should have as much faith in America as I have!” After the interview aired, Reagan phoned Thatcher to tell her she had been “magnificent” and that he was “deeply grateful.” He was in a Cabinet meeting, and before hanging up the phone he held up the receiver so that she could hear the entire Cabinet giving her “a prolonged round of applause.” She was “very touched.” This was not how international relations ordinarily worked. Ever.  

As Reagan’s presidency wound down, and their collaboration on Soviet relations began to bear remarkable fruit, the Reagan-Thatcher friendship became even closer, and the brief moments of friction disappeared almost entirely. At the 1988 NATO summit, Reagan, accMarording to Moore, “stole the show.” In “extemporaneous” remarks, he spelled out the logic of nuclear deterrence. “Throughout the speech,” writes Moore, “Mrs Thatcher sat ‘enthralled.’ At its conclusion, she turned to Reagan and said softly: ‘Brilliant, Ron. Brilliant!” That same year, when he was in London, Thatcher was “highly delighted” and “took great trouble over small things” in regard to his visit to 10 Downing Street. She later recalled happily that he had been “in an expansive mood” that day, “reminiscing and telling jokes.” A Guards’ band was playing in the street, “and when President Reagan recognised a favorite tune, he would sing.” She summed it up as “marvelous.” At this late stage in their friendship, writes Moore, she “was girlishly effusive about Reagan” — but “her admiration,” far from being superficial in any way, was, he underscores, “grounded in her exceptionally long experience of dealing with him.” 

Then came Reagan’s last state dinner, at which, as with his first, he wanted the guest of honor to be Thatcher. Charles Powell, notes Moore, “passed on the message that on these occasions the President, the First Lady, and the guest of honour usually left the dinner after the entertainment and before the dancing,” but Reagan wondered “whether you and Mr. Thatcher would like to stay on for perhaps the first dance with them. This would be an exceptional gesture.’” Thatcher, whose fondness for dancing I have mentioned, replied, “Yes, love to.” On that visit, she arrived with a bad cold; during a meeting in the Oval Office, she lost her voice. Reagan, writes Moore, “became consumed by a desire to help her.” Chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein remembered: “I had never seen Ronald Reagan dote over somebody before. He himself got her a pot of tea. He himself got her tissues…. I remember him scurrying around the Oval Office trying to make her comfortable…. It said everything about their relationship.” At the state dinner, they toasted each other exuberantly. Thatcher recalled her “sheer joy” at his election to the presidency, calling him “a wonderful friend to me and my country — a friend whose cheerful bravery in the face of personal danger and of illness overcome we have all admired and whose optimism and kindness have never been worn down by the pressures and preoccupations of your high office.” 

Thatcher’s adjustment to the presidency of George H.W. Bush was difficult. Despite public statements to the contrary, she wasn’t entirely sure that Bush was as fully in line with her values and priorities as Reagan had been; and whereas Reagan had always admired the passion that she brought to political discussions, Bush was capable of reading it as overbearing, even hectoring. Yet when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Thatcher, stopping in Washington, D.C., on her way home from a conference in Aspen at which both she and Bush had spoken, met with him at the White House about Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The meeting gradually expanded to include a large number of presidential advisers. Powell, her foreign policy man, was present and was “deeply impressed” by what he called “the total frankness and confidence which the President showed to the Prime Minister. She was drawn directly into the US Administration’s decision-making…. I have had a worm’s-eye view of Anglo-American relations at the highest level for quite a long time now. I have never seen it operate with this degree of closeness and trust.” Writes Moore, “She was elated by the meeting.”  Thatcher herself later wrote: “I had always liked George Bush. Now my respect for him soared.” 

Still, Bush never came close to taking Reagan’s place in her heart. When she lost her prime ministership in 1990 owing to the machinations of party colleagues, Thatcher, who believed deeply in loyalty, found their betrayal “shattering.” Being out of office, moreover, also put her in a “difficult financial situation.” She was, in short, not a Clinton, an Obama, or a Biden who had managed miraculously to parlay years of modest government salaries into a massive fortune. Careful with money throughout her political career, she now had almost nothing. Now, to help her out a bit, the Parliament created a modest “public duty cost allowance.” Friends deposited sums into a bank account for her and helped cover her secretaries’ wages. Charlie Price, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.K., found her a house, owned by the widow of Henry Ford II, to borrow in Belgravia. 

But the person who helped her the most was Reagan. A week after she was ejected from 10 Downing Street, she had tea with the Reagans at Claridge’s and, writes Moore, “poured out her woes to them.” Reagan’s chief of staff, Fred Ryan, would later tell Moore that “Reagan felt very badly” about the shabby way in which she’d been shown the exit, and that, at the former president’s direction, Ryan sent her a memo, after the Claridge’s meeting, offering career advice. It ended, “President Reagan would like to do anything possible to assist Mrs. Thatcher as she makes her transition to private life.” Moore sums it all up as follows: “She had assured him, when he left office, that he would retain his importance in her eyes. Now he was saying the same to her.” What Reagan recommended was that she do a lecture tour, primarily in the U.S. He suggested that she sign up with his own speakers’ bureau, and she did so. She was, however, scrupulous about not accepting payment for speeches given in the U.K. or, for that matter, in Communist China or Hong Kong, which, given her role as a signatory of the Hong Kong agreement, she felt could be seen as compromising. Imagine a Clinton, Obama, or Biden acting on such scruples!

Thatcher’s speeches, along with the two volumes of her memoirs published in 1993 and 1995, made her rich for the first time in her life. As noted, the Queen attended her 70th birthday party; Reagan was already suffering from Alzheimer’s, but Nancy came. After the party, Thatcher wrote to her: “Ron is always in our minds.… Fate has dealt him and you a cruel blow.… The best medicine in life is the kindness of real friends and you have many more than you know.” As Moore writes:

The friendship between the Thatchers and the Reagans, real when in office, had become increasingly personal in the years that followed. When Reagan left office in January 1989, Mrs. Thatcher was still prime minister. She was determined to treat him with the same respect she had shown him when he was in the White House, and so gave a small but splendid dinner for him in 10 Downing Street in June of that year, at which, to Reagan’s pleasure, 1970 Château Pétrus —somehow found despite the normally stingy Government Hospitality Fund — was served. When Mrs. Thatcher was pushed out of Downing Street, the Reagans responded in kind. The watchword, as expressed…by Reagan’s chief of staff, Fred Ryan, was “when the question involved Margaret Thatcher, the answer is ‘yes!’” 

In 1994, the same year in which he released his famous letter announcing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Reagan wrote to Thatcher: “Throughout my life, I’ve always believed that life’s path is determined by a force more powerful than Fate. I feel that the Lord brought us together for a profound purpose and that I have been richly blessed for having known you. I am proud to call you one of my dearest friends, Margaret; proud to have shared many of life’s significant moments with you; and thankful that God brought you into my life.” He had already made it clear that he wanted her to deliver his eulogy, and after that she was always prepared, just in case — carrying with her on a trip to Vail, Colorado, for example, a full set of black mourning clothes because “I never know when Ronnie might pass.” During Reagan’s long twilight, Thatcher and Nancy continued to correspond. 

Because of her own debilities, Thatcher recorded her eulogy for Reagan a year ahead of his death. Authorities at the National Cathedral resisted the idea of including a filmed eulogy in the service, but Nancy Reagan stood firm, “If she is willing to sit there, at my husband’s funeral, and hear this and view this and she’s OK with it, then everyone in the cathedral and everyone who’s watching should be OK with it.” Thatcher’s eulogy, along with the one by former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that followed it, add up, in Moore’s estimation, to “an epitaph for the English-speaking dominance of the twentieth century.” Thatcher was, notes Moore, the first non-American to speak at a president’s funeral. (Mulroney was the second.) And she was the only Cathedral guest to fly with the Reagan family back to California on Air Force One for the interment. 

 I did not look forward to reading about Thatcher’s last, confused years. The 2011 movie Iron Lady — which cruelly focused on that stage of her life, outraging Nancy Reagan, among many others — gave me a big enough dose of that. Thatcher never saw the movie, but she was told about it in terms intended to spare her from emotional harm, and when she was shown a picture of Meryl Streep done up to look like her, she commented, “She’s attractive, isn’t she?” It was a lonely time. In her nineties she adopted “the fattest and ugliest” cat from an animal hospital. “The two became very close, and she loved brushing him,” writes Moore, but the cat had a dangerous habit of winding itself around her legs at the top of the stairs, and so her caretakers found it another home. It was charming, also, to learn that Thatcher and one of her caretakers read poems to each other. Somehow I had been unaware – or had forgotten? — that Thatcher’s daughter, Carol, actually published a book about her dementia, which understandably disgusted many of Thatcher’s friends. 

When Thatcher died in 2013, President Obama sent two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and James Baker, to the funeral. (“They should have had someone more senior go,” complained Nancy Reagan.) Glenda Jackson, the Oscar-winning actress who had played Elizabeth I in the series Elizabeth R and who was now a Labour Party member of Parliament, reacted to Thatcher’s death by making breathtakingly reprehensible remarks in the House of Commons. A generation of know-nothing British subjects, brainwashed by left-wing teachers and media propaganda and utterly unaware of all that Thatcher had done to save their country from economic disaster and international mediocrity, sent the old song “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” to No. 2 on the UK charts. 

No, she wasn’t perfect. Who is? But she was head and shoulders above virtually all of her critics and virtually all of the heads of government of her, or any, day. She had all the right values and was in politics for all the right reasons. During the Falklands War, after a false report that the battle cruiser HMS Invincible had been sunk, Denis found her “sitting on the end of the bed, weeping.” “All my young men!” she wept. He comforted her: “That’s what war’s like, love. I’ve been in one. I know.” But she knew, too. As Moore notes, her “attitude to the death of servicemen in combat was much influenced by her life on the home front in the Second World War.” As a girl in Grantham, she would see “young aircrew streaming in and out of pubs” and was “aware that it could be their last day alive.” It was an experience that “made her both sentimental about the sacrifice required and tender to those who made it.” What a contrast to the palpable indifference shown by Joe Biden when he was seen checking his watch during the formal reception of the remains of 13 U.S. service members killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan!

Indeed, to come to the end of Moore’s biography of Thatcher is to be filled with mixed feelings. On the one hand, one feels inspired by her example and awed by her role in strengthening freedom in the world; on the other, one is saddened at the thought of how much of what she accomplished has been lost, discarded, undone. Since the end of her prime ministership, the number of Muslims in Britain has quadrupled, IRA terrorism has been replaced by Islamic terrorism, Muslim rape gangs have destroyed the lives of unimaginable thousands of British girls, and once-great cities have become almost unlivable owing to Muslim criminality. Imagine what Thatcher, who cherished the ancient British liberties, would have made of the imprisonment of hundreds of Britons in recent years for the crime of “hate speech” — that is, for exercising what they thought was their freedom of expression, usually in regard to Islam. 

Imagine, for that matter, what Thatcher, who played a proud role in defending the Free World in the last act of the Cold War, would have made of the erosion of freedom throughout the nations of the Free World in the 21st century — Justin Trudeau’s freezing of the assets of protesting truckers, Jacinda Ardern’s unctuous denunciation of unlimited free speech in New Zealand, Biden’s weaponization of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department against his White House predecessor and other political enemies, and the transformation of news media and online social networks throughout the Western world into instruments of a left-wing globalist establishment that is, frankly, determined to stamp out the liberty for which Thatcher fought so valiantly. To read the story of Margaret Thatcher’s life, in short, is to look back at a very different time — a time of hope and courage and promise — from a historical moment in which every great and good thing for which she stood is profoundly imperiled.

READ MORE from Bruce Bawer:

Radical Wolfe: An Underwhelming Account of the Revolutionary Journalist

Ms. Turns Fifty

Norman Mailer Was an Out-and-Out Psychopath

Hollywood Can’t Do Funny Anymore, but It Turns Out Czechia Can