Britain the Very Best of Friends

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She gladly claims that no one admires Ronald Reagan more than she does. "I'm his greatest fan," Margaret Thatcher has said. For his part, Reagan has never hidden his glowing respect for the Conservative British leader. So it came as no surprise that Thatcher and Reagan behaved like a two-person mutual admiration society during the Prime Minister's two-day visit to Washington last week, lavishing each other with high praise and champagne toasts. The British leader also enjoyed an ebullient welcome on Capitol Hill when she addressed a joint meeting of the Congress. Small wonder that Thatcher, as one aide put it, "just likes coming to America."

Leaving Britain behind, if only for a couple of days, might also have contributed to Thatcher's sunny mood. Ten years after she became head of her country's Conservative Party and nearly six years since she assumed the post ! of Prime Minister, Thatcher faces a daunting array of problems. Britain's unemployment rate of 13.9% is the country's highest since the Depression. The pound, worth $1.44 a year ago (and $2 in 1981), sank to $1.07 last week. A miners' strike, which has cost the country an estimated $3.8 billion and divided the nation, will go into its second year in March; a carefully crafted settlement fell apart while Thatcher was in the U.S.

Although her government recaptured the offensive last week in a nasty parliamentary squabble over the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano during the 1982 Falklands war, questions linger about the timing and motives behind the attack. The latest survey by Britain's respected MORI poll puts the Labor Party even with the Conservatives at 37%, the Tories' lowest ebb in three years.

The high point of Thatcher's visit was her speech before Congress. The last British Prime Minister so honored was Winston Churchill in 1952. Dressed in a black suit and flowered blouse, Thatcher received a two-minute standing ovation as she stepped onto the podium. After noting that Churchill had enjoyed a "special advantage" because his American mother had given him "ties of blood with you," Thatcher drew laughter by dryly adding, "Alas for me, these are not matters we can readily arrange for ourselves."

Thatcher then delivered what amounted to a valentine to U.S.-British relations. Her voice at times schoolmarmish but her delivery well modulated, the Prime Minister glossed over the battering of the British pound by the strong dollar, noting that "it is a marvelous time for Americans not only to visit Britain but to invest with us." On East-West relations, Thatcher insisted that the goal of the Soviet Union remained "the total triumph of socialism all over the world."