There was nothing slow about Ronald Reagan. He spotted me for an Englishman right away

Ronald Reagan fascinated me from the moment he became governor of California in 1966. He was a right-winger who had won office. In those days right-wingers never won anything. Every office-holder or potential office-holder in every democracy — Labour, Tory, Democrat, Republican — seemed to be a liberal or a centrist. All the authorities said that that was the only way democracies could be governed.

I had only just become interested in politics, and was bored by the subject already. If no one could do anything differently from anyone else, when would I witness any of the great clashes that I had just started reading about in books?

Then came Reagan. He was apparently a fading actor, and a former Democrat who had for some years been making a living out of pro-capitalist and anti-communist speeches for various institutions which were that way inclined. He then made a stirring television speech in support of the hopeless Goldwater candidacy in 1964. Immediately afterwards, some southern Californian multimillionaires paid for him to run for governor. The Democrat incumbent, Pat Brown, patronised him. Reagan won overwhelmingly. This was interesting.

Pieces began appearing in the broadsheet British press warning against this dangerous man. That made him even more interesting. Neither I, nor the British broadsheet press, was to know that in truth, as governor, he had not done anything particularly right-wing. He had staged a quarrel with the Californian universities for letting New Left students run riot about Vietnam. But the welfare budget was just as big as ever. He talked right-wing. He did not do right-wing. This was to be the pattern of his career and the explanation for his success. He was good at stringing right-wingers along.

In 1969, he came to London to address the Institute of Directors in the Albert Hall.