Even Margaret Thatcher didn't like President Reagan

I typically try to understand what President Ronald Reagan was thinking when teaching Latin American politics and US-Latin American relations even if I disagree with the course of action he and his administration chose to pursue. But then there's this:

On the face of it, [Margaret] Thatcher’s relations with Reagan were more cordial, but she had no illusions about him. Her first foreign secretary was Lord Carrington, with whom she was talking over a drink one evening. As the conversation turned to the American president, Thatcher looked at Carrington, tapped the side of her skull, and said: “Peter, there’s nothing there.”

When the Falklands war broke out, relations for a time were very strained. One of the soi-disant intellectuals in the Reagan administration was the neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick, who wanted to keep on good terms with General Galtieri and his gang of murderers in Buenos Aires, and dined at the Argentinian embassy on the night of the invasion. The British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson, said that it was as if he had joined the Iranians for tea on the day that the Americans were taken hostage in Tehran.

What Thatcher’s detractors on the left might try to grasp is that she was far less servile in her dealings with Washington than Tony Blair. In particular, she was highly critical of American policy (or lack of it) in the Middle East, insisting that there would never be peace until justice was done to the Palestinians.

By 1989 Reagan had left the White House, and the following year Mrs T was defenestrated from Downing Street. Not long after that, “Nico” Henderson was talking to Tony Benn, and said: “If I reported to you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations

 Better to say nothing.