A meeting of minds

Mrs Thatcher will be here in a few days to visit President Reagan and old Washington hands, whose memories go back a few decades, are anticipating a love fest more ardent than anything seen here since the great day, just before Christmas in 1941 when we – we, being the press – poured into the president's office in the White House and heard President Roosevelt say, 'I wish you'd just stand up for one minute and let them see you. They can't see you!'.

It's true we couldn't see this guest, whoever he was. Guests at a presidential press conference are very rare, but his presence had been telegraphed by smoke signals rising from a cigar. However, a plump cherub stood up, still out of sight to most of the reporters, until he climbed up on to his chair and revealed himself as Prime Minister Churchill, at which point – and I'm quoting from the official transcript of the Roosevelt Press conferences – 'loud and spontaneous cheers and applause rang through the room'.

I ought to say, though, that if Mrs Thatcher doesn't hear loud and spontaneous cheers ringing through the White House on her arrival, that will be mainly because we know she's coming. In the middle of the Second World War, we did not advertise the movements of Allied statesmen. They crossed the Atlantic in stealth and secrecy or, as we'd now say, in maximum security and the sight of Churchill, just off the battle line, pink and cosy there in the White House was unreal – a shock, a delightful one, which explains why the cheers were so loud and spontaneous.

One of the minor hobbies of president-watchers is guessing how the new man will get along with the incumbent leaders of the Western Allies. The press is always quick to tell us, on the basis of a rash of rumours along the Champs-Elysées, say, that Mr Giscard d'Estaing could not abide President Carter. We won't really know till the memoirs come out, but it's dangerous to guess or pretend to know who is going to take to whom.

Lyndon Johnson, for instance, was willing to tell all comers that he had a favourite prime minister and I'll bet that not one listener in a hundred would get it right first time. 'I took to the man,' he once confided, 'because we talk the same language and in off hours we did the same things. I told him about the wild turkeys and the gauge required to land a white-tail deer and the bass fishing in the Pedernales River and he told me about the grouse and the barley crop and fishing for trout. And I'll tell you another thing, he knew what was confidential in our talks together and what was not. He knew better than some when to keep his trap shut. A fine gentleman and a great guy.' Nobody but Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

However, there is no speculation, no question, about the warmth of Mrs Thatcher's reception because she and President Reagan are not merely sympathetic ideologically, they are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For the first time since prime ministers and presidents have got together – and let's not forget it's a very recent habit, mostly since the invention of the jet plane, most presidents lived and died without ever meeting a British or a French prime minister – for the first time we have an American president and a British prime minister of the precisely same political colour, of identical convictions held with similar passion and with programmes for the economic recovery of their countries which are carbon copies of each other.

What adds an intense, and almost morbid, interest to this meeting is that it's almost two years now since Mrs Thatcher did what Mr Reagan says he's going to do and while Mr Reagan was telling us last Wednesday evening that by trimming waste and cutting taxes and slashing at social spending, he will balance the budget by 1984, that employment will go up, that the inflation growth rate will drop from its present 11.1 per cent to 8.3 per cent next year and 5.5 in 1984 and the anaemic – his word – the anaemic growth of the economy, which is now 1.1 per cent, will become robust and go from 4 to 5 per cent a year from next year on.

Well, while we were relishing this wonderful new view of the fateful year of 1984, we seemed to recall that Mrs Thatcher had similar hopes for 1981 and 2, but her hopes and dreams have been, shall we say, moderated. I'm saying this with no sarcastic reservations. Mrs Thatcher will be able to tell Mr Reagan a thing or two as she catches him in the glow of his first month in the presidency.

And I must say that with any other president and at any other time we could expect by now that the opposition party would be, if not in full hue and cry, at least beginning to moan and groan about the new man for welching on his promises, but he's not done that. He's doing the extraordinary thing, the almost unprecedented thing, of actually abiding by – nay, proclaiming as a new faith, the platform on which he won the election. It was said long ago, and has invariably been true, that nothing is more perishable in American politics than the party platforms adopted at the nominating conventions.

Look back in amazement for a minute at the platform on which Franklin Roosevelt first ran and was first elected. Throughout the long, grim summer of 1932 he declared in his soaring tenor voice that the whole cause of the nation's sickness, the Great Depression, lay in the great and growing power of the central government, taking over things that no government should intrude on, stifling initiative. It was time to give the government of the people, he said, back to the people, to the states and the cities where the people know what they want and deserve to get it.

That Democratic platform of 1932 is one of the most unreal documents in this country's history. The day Roosevelt was inaugurated, he seized power at the centre, suspended the powers of the states beyond the limits set by the constitution as it came out and launched an era of an all-powerful federal government which has lasted ever since. Although the separate states had, and have, autonomous powers which still amaze foreigners, throughout the past 50 years and increasingly, the people, when in trouble, look not to their state capitals and their governors, but to Washington and their senators.

As one stolid Democrat put it, a man stunned by Reagan's election but beginning to have second thoughts, 'Today we expect Washington to save bankrupt cities and automobile companies, to lead the fight against street crime, to put middle-class children through college, to support the income of farmers, to help feed and house the poor, to build highways and transit systems – 50 years ago, none of these things was regarded as the responsibility of the federal government.'

It's true. And even the most seasoned and uncynical Democrats expected that once Mr Reagan was in the White House, he would do what a dozen presidents had done before him – not quite as barefacedly as Roosevelt certainly – he would forget the platform, adjust to the shock of reality and begin to talk much like Mr Carter. Well, it hasn't happened. He believed in that platform, he meant what he said and he means to do it, or try.

Admittedly, the promised ten per cent cut in taxes, which was to be retroactive to 1 January, will not go into effect till July, but in just about everything else, he seems determined to follow the gaudy and daring blueprint he laid out at the convention. The effect on the Democrats, who find themselves in the minority in the Senate for the first time in 30-odd years and who, in the House, find many of their own party in rebellious sympathy with the president, the effect has been one of shock tempered by admiration.

One powerful congressman, a Democrat, said, after hearing the president's economic speech, 'If this thing works or looks like working, two years from now, it's we Democrats who are going to have to rescue our party from oblivion. It's the first big radical turn in American government in 50 years and I tell you, he's either going to come out of it a stumble-bum or a hero'.

So, surprisingly, the Democrats are lying low. They are shaken. This doesn't mean that when the president's daring proposals come to them, his request to cut or reduce 83 government programmes now in being, this doesn't mean that they won't proceed according to their regular maxim – he may take money from thee, but never from me.

The one striking reservation that Mr Reagan has made since he spoke as President Reagan and not as candidate Reagan is that he no longer uses swashbuckling verbs like 'end' inflation and 'lower' the budget. He was careful to make clear the other evening, though whether people got it is another question, that his master plan is, I quote, 'aimed at reducing the growth in government spending and taxing and reducing the growth of inflation'.

Now, even if the millennium comes in, a hamburger that costs a dollar this year is still going to cost one dollar and eleven cents next year. When the budget is cut and drastically, the government will still be spending much more than it did last year. The population grows, it needs more services than it did, costs of everything – material, labour – will keep rising in step with inflation.

President Reagan asks us – and he got a round of applause from saying, 'It's not my plan, it's our plan' – he asks us 'to join me in reducing direct federal spending by 41 billions in the next fiscal year'. In all, he promises, he wants to save 49 billions and this means that next year we will spend only $40 billion more on government than we did this year. How's that again?

Well, now you see why he cannot talk any longer about slashing the budget or cutting inflation. Mr Carter's budget allowed for an increase of 89 billions. Mr Reagan hopes to save 49 billions out of them. In other words, he has no hope – no government can have a hope – of reducing spending, reducing inflation. They can only try to reduce the growth rate of both.

I should like to be a fly on the wall some late evening this coming week and hear President Reagan tell Prime Minister Thatcher how he's going to do it and hear her tell him how she did it.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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