308 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
She in truth had a thing about him. They began to get on ‘like a
house on fire’, and had intense and enjoyable disputes whenever they
met.^36 Foreign ministers Howe and Shevardnadze also warmed to each
other but their transactions had no international impact.^37 This was
because Thatcher monopolized her government’s handling of the
Soviet question. She made a point of excluding her Foreign Secretary
from her meetings with Reagan and Bush. Shultz noticed that she
did not bother to bring him with her to Washington.^38 Increasingly she
valued Gorbachëv as someone who was changing the direction of
history in the USSR. Recognizing the difficulties he faced, she saw a
parallel with what she was trying to do in the United Kingdom.^39 It is
true that she never abandoned her suspiciousness about his relation-
ship with her other friend, Ron. Gorbachëv liked and respected her
but felt he needed to treat her with caution. On 10 March 1988 he told
the Politburo that she continued to head those Western politicians
who accused the Kremlin of demagogy and insincerity.^40 As he saw it,
he needed to keep himself informed about her dealings with the White
House as the American and Soviet leaderships moved towards ratify-
ing the treaty on intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Britain
and France still refused to give up their nuclear weapons. Thatcher and
Gorbachëv charmed each other without either dropping their basic
reservations.
While she spared this one communist leader from criticism, her
anticommunism was unrelenting. On her visit to Poland in November
1988 she reserved space in her programme to meet Lech Wałęsa and
place flowers on the grave of the murdered Father Jerzy Popiełuszko.
Jaruzelski felt he had to permit this. Communist administrations in
Eastern Europe no longer believed they could prescribe the perambu-
lations of a foreign leader on their territory. Jaruzelski’s priority was to
ensure that she arrived and departed without disturbance. He rea-
soned that her very presence would show Polish people that the West
regarded communist Poland as a normal country.^41 She took her
chance to indicate the opposite. Her floral tribute to the late Pop-
iełuszko meant more to most Poles than her formal encounter with
Jaruzelski. Her impact in Poland was almost as deep as that which
she had achieved in Moscow a year earlier. But she worried that as
Reagan’s second term drew to a close, the sun might set on her inter-
national influence. She had imposed herself to a large extent by
triangulating between the Kremlin and the White House from her
base in Downing Street. She had never got on with Mitterrand or