‘A man I can do business with’: the bond with Thatcher that tore down the Iron Curtain

WHEN Margaret Thatcher declared “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together”, it began a relationship that would lead to the tearing down of the Iron Curtain.

The late Prime Minister met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984, when he led a Russian delegation to Britain.

She hosted him at Chequers, and the tense atmosphere led Mr Gorbachev to tell Mrs Thatcher that he had no intentions of trying to recruit her to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

She broke into laughter and the pair found they could engage in “real political dialogue” despite opposing views.

It was following this meeting, months before Mr Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader, that Mrs Thatcher made her comment.

Mr Gorbachev would later describe the pair’s friendship as a catalyst for the tearing down of the Iron Curtain.

“We gradually developed personal relations that became increasingly friendly,” he said after her death in 2013.

“In the end, we were able to achieve mutual understanding, and this contributed to a change in the atmosphere between our country and the West and to the end of the Cold War.”

It was Mrs Thatcher’s “we can do business together” comment, he said, that helped him forge a “mutual understanding” with President Ronald Reagan and other world leaders.

Mr Gorbachev did not appear to have the same respect for Reagan. Declassified documents show that after the Ussoviet summit at Reykjavik in 1986, he complained of the then US President’s “extreme primitivism, a caveman cast of mind and intellectual feebleness”. By contrast, Mr Gorbachev and Mrs Thatcher found shared enjoyment in their debates, sometimes arguing, as he put it, “until we were red in the face”.

The former Soviet leader was also known to value Mrs Thatcher’s attention to detail and ability to work long hours with little sleep.

Mrs Thatcher was an important interloper between Reagan and Gorbachev – “an agent of influence in both directions”, as her former foreign policy adviser Sir Percy Cradock put it.

The initial favourable impact Gorbachev made on Mrs Thatcher and his pursuit of liberal reforms, Glasnost and Perestroika, was to prove an accurate assessment of his qualities.

In just over six years, the Soviet leader lifted the Iron Curtain, altering Russia’s relations with the West.