Margaret Thatcher: Freedom Is Working

Awaiting the outcome of last week's balloting, Margaret Thatcher, elegantly dressed for the victory celebration that was to come, sat on a brocade sofa in the handsome white drawing room at 10 Downing Street and talked with TIME London Bureau Chief Bonnie Angela. Excerpts from the interview:

On her first term. It is quite a lot for a politician to be able to take the long-term view, knowing that it is going to give you immense short-term trouble. That was the great decision, and we held together over it. The achievement in inflation is not just that it has come down to 4% from 21%, but that it has been done without the panoply of prices and incomes or exchange controls. Freedom is working.

On the Atlantic Alliance. After our election, I think we are much more likely to get disarmament negotiations going, and that would be a very cohesive thing in the alliance. I think the Russians are desperately hoping that their efforts will have some effect on our public opinion. [Chancellor] Helmut Kohl's election was immensely important to the NATO alliance in West Germany, so mine here is immensely important. I think it is only after the Russians know that the main legs of the alliance are staying absolutely firm that we might get some genuine disarmament negotiations going in Geneva. There has been a tremendous feeling this year that the most important thing [at Williamsburg] was cohesiveness and unity among the Western alliance.

On the European Community. I am a passionate believer in Europe because the democracies of the world have got to show they can stand together. Whatever the differences that divide them, and there can be many, they have got to be subordinate to the overwhelming need to stand together. It is a very uncertain world in which we live, and it always will be.

On summitry. It is very important that the seven of us [leaders of the U.S., Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada] get together. It is not so much the great communiques that came out, although the two communiques that came out [in Williamsburg last month] were very good and absolutely right for the Western world at this time. The thing is that we cannot meet in private. That is what all of us hanker after: to meet and have a good talk in private without the world press being there. But if two or three of us were to talk together it would leak out, and there would be some false significance attached to it. I think it is a great pity.

On Britain's nuclear weapons. So long as there are immense ballistic missiles in the world, we have to have an independent nuclear deterrent. It adds to the general deterrent effect of the NATO alliance, just as the French force does. But if, between the two big powers, the numbers went down massively and enormously and we moved into a totally different world—a far greater reduction than I can foresee certainly within the next five years—then there may be circumstances when ours will have to be counted [in arms negotiations]. But I cannot foresee that at the moment.