Michael White: Ronald Reagan and the Joy of Myth-making

Michael White is assistant editor and has been writing for the Guardian for more than 30 years, as a reporter, foreign correspondent and columnist. He was political editor from 1990-2006, having previously been the paper's Washington correspondent (1984-88) and parliamentary sketchwriter (1977-84).

I stayed the course with the Reagan posse after the unveiling of his statue in Grosvenor Square yesterday. That meant attending the gala dinner in the City of London's gorgeous Guildhall and being teased by colleagues in the hack pack for joining assorted toasts to the 40th president, the Queen and others deemed (by the hacks) to be Guardian class enemies.

Never mind, it was a fascinating tribal occasion, as tribal occasions often are for non-tribalists. Apart from my own report on the unveiling today's Guardian contains at least two more reports taking prods at Reagan and his legacy, in contrast to more Tory papers, which were content with anodyne picture captions.

So tribalism cuts both ways. I'll come back to that in a moment.

All the same, I was mightily impressed by the power of high-gloss myth-making during both sets of speeches I heard from the Tory and Republican dignitaries who assembled in Mayfair and later regrouped at the Guildhall to do it all again, this time as an expensive fund-raiser.

As I noted yesterday, Reagan had an easy charm and crafty political skills. Thus during my sojourn in the Washington of his second term I quickly realised that when the Prez (personally liberal in his instincts, he'd lived in Hollywood for years) attacked abortion it probably meant he was about to let down the pro-lifers. He had a chameleon-like quality, which Medhi Hassan notes in his comment page article.

No point here in spending more time picking holes in the claims made by William Hague, Condoleezza Rice and other cheerleaders keen to promote Reagan as a major world statesman of the end of the 20th century because he "won" the cold war – defence secretary Liam Fox's verb of choice.

My interest here is his impact on his own country, not the wider world where he is revered in eastern Europe – as is Margaret Thatcher – for helping bring down the Berlin Wall and let east Europeans win both major Wimbledon titles last weekend, but not revered in regions where US policy was less benign.

It can be said of Thatcher that she did indeed change the political weather and direction in Britain during her 11-year rule after 1979. In ending the postwar quasi-social democratic economic settlement in favour of a more marketised economy she did good things and bad. We all benefited, even those who lost their jobs, though currently we are also feeling the costs of the financial train crash of 2007-9 which she set in motion.

Can such a claim be made for Ronnie – as Nancy Reagan called him in last night's video message – in the US, already a far more marketised economy than any in western Europe when he became president in 1981? I think not...