The lunch that began the end of the Cold War

It is one of the great counterfactuals of contemporary history, what if Mikhail Gorbachev had walked out of that Chequers lunch with Margaret Thatcher in 1984? As Charles Moore explained at last night’s Spectator event to celebrate the launch of the second volume of his Thatcher biography, that lunch—where Thatcher and Gorbachev debated capitalism and Communism—was key to the ending of the Cold War. For Thatcher then persuaded Ronald Reagan that he should meet Gorbachev and that Gorbachev was someone they could do business with. But Gorbachev had almost left Chequers early, his wife had mouthed to him across the table ‘should we go now?’ as Thatcher hammered away at the Communist system and Soviet support for the striking miners

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

In discussion with Andrew Neil, Charles remarked that the one aspect of the reception of the book that he had been disappointed with, was how everyone had concentrated on the domestic side of things.