Margaret Thatcher and travelling during Thanksgiving - 23 November 1990

On the eve of Thanksgiving, a very rare thing happened. On the front page of the country's leading newspapers, certainly in the three papers that since they're distributed from coast to coast, can claim to be national newspapers, on their front pages, there was a news story, I ought to stress, a political news story, datelined London.

So, is that odd, rare? Very. There was a time, when I first came here, and it must have been true for many years before 1932, but let's say from the 1920s, through the Second World War and perhaps through the 1950s, most days of the week there'd be a London despatch on the American front pages, simply because Britain was one of the two or three great powers.

Probably, to most influential Americans in politics, in finance, the one country that you had to stay in touch with. A political decision in London could affect not only the United States but sometimes the far corners of the earth. Before the Second World War, remember, a quarter of that earth was painted red on our maps. It marked the awesome extent of the still composed, stable British empire.

And just as now, all the world listens to a serious political decision by President Bush or Mr Gorbachev, so in the 1930s, any new move by Mr Anthony Eden would be on our front pages next morning.

Now, in any given week, you can be sure, if there are foreign stories on the front pages, they'll almost certainly be from Moscow, Bonn, possibly Paris, possibly Tokyo. But last Wednesday, first column, front page, the Wall Street Journal, "How Britain's Thatcher got in serious trouble with her own party".

United Europe is the big issue. The New York Times, "Thatcher unable to eliminate foe. Run off is set next week". Flanking the despatch, which runs on and on, on an inside page are two photographs, one of Mrs Thatcher, the other of Mr Heseltine. The Wall Street Journal has almost a page devoted to the history of her administration.

This rare event, a story about British politics, explored at great and knowledgeable length, after a front page lead, is more than anything a tribute to Mrs Thatcher as one of the few first-rate European political leaders to emerge since the Second War, never mind how you feel about her or her policies.

The earliest and best of Ronald Reagan's biographers wrote about him, "he has changed once for all, the nature of the political discourse". And, in the same way, whether you worship or detest Mr Reagan, there's no question that his political philosophy and his doggedness in carrying it out, reversed 50 years of America's automatic dependence, in all serious matters of public need, public service, dependence on the federal government.

That sentence of the Reagan biographer is even truer, I think, of Mrs Thatcher because the United States never had so extreme a choice as that between a Conservative and a socialist government. She too, changed the nature of the political discourse.

The whole story, by the way, of Mrs Thatcher's relations and/or conflict with the European Community, the price of full membership in the European Monetary System, her troubles with the poll tax, have all been gone over and thoroughly reported here and, of course, without editorial fawnings or sniffings.

The only editorial note that creeps into the Wall Street Journal story is one that Mr Bush and the United States department of agriculture would no doubt echo. It says the demise of Mrs Thatcher would deprive the United States of a staunch ally in fighting European farm subsidies, a debate that is jeopardising international trade negotiations on an array of goods and services.

On the other hand, we're also getting a rousing earful of Mr Kinnock's resounding declaration that the government is deeply divided and seriously disabled. And also much probing of the opinions and predictions of the supporters of Mr Heseltine, Mr Major, Mr Hurd, whose biographies, the newspaper morgues, I'm sure, are busy bringing up to date.

Well, it's a change and a relief to be able to say for once that an American occasion came along this past week, that could, for a day or two, give a legitimate pause to the anxiety, more than anything else, that has more and more plagued Americans since the beginning of August.

The anxiety that won't dwindle or go away is, of course, the dread stalemate, even before the game has begun, between the now huge opposing forces of Saddam Hussein and, mainly, of the United States. Thursday was the day of the one unique American festival of Thanksgiving, originally thanks given to God by the settlers on Cape Cod for their first successful harvest.

They'd had a rough time for over two years, poor crops, many deaths, situation at one time close to famine, but by the end of the third autumn, they had, as old William Bradford, the Yorkshire scribe of their travails put it, bounteous crops of corn, maize and – what with their discovery of a strange bird, the turkey, and the harvest of the cranberry bogs – they survived.

Thanksgiving is the occasion for the family get-together, more so, in a country of many religions, than Christmas and it's therefore a rather awful time to travel. Usually by the afternoon before Thanksgiving, Thursday, the highways that lead to the airports are jammed and the check-in counters swirl and surge with people waving tickets and rebels protesting the airline's explanation that, through some computer error, always today, your flight has been overbooked.

Well this year, the glum fact was that air travel at Thanksgiving was very markedly down, off the norm. A famous airline that patrols the whole east coast reported for the first time they could recall, planes leaving on Wednesday evening with empty seats.

This is only another of the many signs of first, I suppose, the recession that, in the north-east anyway, is as palpable as an incoming rainstorm. But the precautions that people take against it, buying less, staying home this year, have been aggravated by the two dread words, the Gulf.

The price of petrol wobbles uncertainly according to the production quota set by Saudi Arabia, but I think most people are aware that if the war came, the petrol queue would be back with us. The surprising slump in airline travel has another explanation, which does not occur right away to the passenger, unless he's a regular flyer and suddenly notices the hefty rise in the price of his ticket. In any oil shortage, or rumoured oil shortage, the price of aviation fuel is the first to leap.

While I was reading about the fate of the British prime minister and the nature of the political discourse, I came on a precious quotation dug up by a Mr Peterson, a scholar who teaches something called business philosophy in North Carolina.

I thought I knew the Pilgrims' literature pretty well and especially the memorable, the eloquent, journal of that old Yorkshireman, William Bradford but Mr Peterson has found a passage about how, in 1620, Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony, as he was, dictated a communal system of farming, with the common harvest being rationed out.

The crops for the following two years were disastrous, what with listless workers, they were underfed and much night-time stealing of crops. By the third year, Governor Bradford told how he came to abandon communal farming and privatise was the word he was reaching for, or as he put it, that they should "set corn every man for his own particular and in that regard trust to themselves and so assigned to every family a parcel of land".

This had very good success for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than other ways would have been. On the other hand, he says, the experience that was had in that common cause, tried sundry years, may well show the vanity of that conceit of Plato's, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of property and bringing it in community, into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.

Well, this is a vanity that all the newly-independent peoples of eastern Europe, among others, must now be regretting and learning painfully how to overcome.

There's one other note about Thanksgiving that I must share with you. Up a hundred and more miles north of New York City, in the Finger Lakes region, are two valiant Americans, a man and wife who were busy on the days before Thanksgiving, driving literally thousands of miles, carrying 89 of the homeless to adoptive parents in eight states.

It's an heroic undertaking but Laurie and Jean Borston are evangelists of a sort, with a deep, abiding concern for the homeless, especially during the feast of Thanksgiving. Most of these homeless wards of the Borstons are arthritic and will be delivered only to homes that have a doctor on call and almost all these abandoned homeless will die within the year, for they are very old – they are four years old. They will be lovingly taken care of as long as they live.

They are, by the way, turkeys. They qualified for the care of the Borstens by meeting their definition put out throughout eight states, "Homeless, abused or liberated turkeys to be placed in a caring home".

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