Individuals and relations between leaders play a role in international politics. The broadly parallel leaderships of President Ronald W. Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saw a revival of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ in the 1980s. The quality and intensity of their personal rapport is frequently assumed to have played a role in this. Deepening Cold War tensions and a strong anti-communist rhetoric also played important roles in drawing the two leaders closer. A commonality of many critical interests, along with cultural, linguistic, political and filial ties, underpinned their growing attachment and friendship. In addition, pre-existing intelligence cooperation, defence and nuclear interdependence (most would say British dependence on the US) helped to forge strong links between both countries. The closeness of the Anglo-American relationship during the period and its apparent personification in the rapport between the two leaders approached only the quality and intensity of the relationships seen between Churchill and Roosevelt, Macmillan and Eisenhower, and Macmillan and Kennedy. As always, since the Second World War, a wide asymmetry in objective power characterised the Anglo-American pairing. Indeed, the imbalance by the 1980s was cavernous by comparison to earlier decades. Like their predecessors, Reagan and Thatcher faced powerful critics of the Special Relationship within their governments and societies.

The pair first met on 9 April 1975 when Reagan was in London to address the Pilgrim Society at the Savoy Hotel. Having recently retired as Governor of California, Reagan had set his sights firmly on the 1976 US Republican presidential nomination, and he was keen to establish close political ties in Britain. Reagan was refused a meeting with the then Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and was therefore keen to meet with the recently elected Leader of the Opposition Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, too, was eager to meet Reagan, a man of whom her husband Denis had spoken highly following an address Reagan had given to the Institute of Directors in London a few years earlier in 1969. Denis is said to have forecast to his wife that Reagan would ‘go a long way’. Thatcher read the speech with interest, and was inspired to read many of his subsequent speeches and fortnightly addresses to the people of California which were sent to her by Reagan's Press Secretary. In fact, she ‘agreed with them all’.