The sun shone over Mayfair for Ronald Reagan today. It usually did for America's 40th president, perhaps the most easygoing man ever to occupy the White House. But, if the weather did not let him down, the 4 July ceremony to unveil his 10ft statue outside the US embassy in central London certainly did.
It was not that much of what the assembled Reagan fan club claimed for his presidency was mere nostalgia – mutual reassurance for the Atlantic special relationship in an increasingly Pacific world – more that was it a bit pompous and self-important, as Reagan never was.
Even sculptor Chas Fagan's bronze, when it was finally unveiled, looked too formal and stiff to be right. You wanted to see the president with his feet up or sleeping (one of his favourite jokes) during a cabinet meeting – at very least to be smiling more broadly in this, his centenary year.
After all, it was his genius for affability, his willingness to laugh at himself, his corny jokes, his titanium-plated optimism, which made millions of Americans like Ronnie Reagan, even when many of them did not approve of what he was actually doing. Like JFK and – Republicans hate this comparison – Bill Clinton, Reagan had the ability to light up a room simply by entering it.
Standing for re-election in 1984 at the age of 73, he won 49 states. When he acknowledged his Alzheimer's condition 10 years later, his open letter to the US people ("I am one of million of Americans who will be afflicted …") was a model of grace. He died in 2004.
But no, the private ceremony in Grosvenor Square was a solemn occasion with a political purpose: the urgent need to proclaim the boy from smalltown Illinois "one of America's most admired and respected presidents" (Ambassador Louis Susman) and "without question a great American hero" (William Hague), the man who "brought millions of people to freedom as the iron curtain finally came down" (Margaret Thatcher).
Lady Thatcher was too fragile to make the journey from nearby Belgravia so early in the day, but her message was read and her (dubious) claim that "Ronald Reagan won the cold war without firing a shot" is inscribed on the statue's plinth. So if anyone shared the day's honours, it was her, though Sir Winston Churchill was also heavily name-checked.
Churchill's wartime ally, Franklin D Roosevelt, was a hated Democrat, which is awkward on tribal Tory/Republican occasions. But Reagan's talent for invention (his first career was as a radio sports reporter covering baseball games he was not actually watching: he was brilliant) overcame that difficulty. FDR, whose own statue stands across the square, was one of his early heroes and remained so. It was the Democrats who changed.
So Condoleezza Rice, the Republican former secretary of state, spoke of the Reagan-Thatcher partnership's mutual regard and "courage to act on their values". So did Hague, who was first elected an MP in the year Reagan left office, 1989. The foreign secretary called him a statesman, a shining optimist, a negotiator who turned America's cold war enemies into friends and negotiated away nuclear missile systems with Mikhail Gorbachev — the name conspicuously not mentioned as Reagan's brave and vital partner in detente.
The session, complete with US military band playing God Save the Queen and The Star Spangled Banner, was well attended by Old Guard Reagan Republicans and Thatcherite Tories — Michael Howard, George Osborne, Liam Fox, Eric Pickles deep in conversation (about the homeless?) with Iain Duncan Smith. Wellwishers with time and money on their hands turned up. So did younger Tory MPs hoping to inhale some of the Reagan stardust.
Despite the wholesome sunshine the awkward fact remains that, more than most mythologised presidents, Reagan's achievements were more contentious and his legacy is more uncertain. Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower, all were major figures who have London statues, less so JFK whose statue is in Marylebone (but we liked him).
As if still mesmerised by what Reagan biographers called his "willed ignorance", his capacity to re-write the facts Hollywood-style, the Reagan Fan Club in Grosvenor Square recycled some innocent porkies on his behalf.
No, he was not inspired to turn Republican by Eisenhower in 1952, he was an FBI informer in the Hollywood actors' union long before that. And yes he may have been a declared enemy of big government, but he was also the first of the know-nothing, credit card Republican presidents who piled up deficits like drunken sailors.
Even his successor, George Bush Sr, called Reagan's high spend/low tax formula "voodoo economics". It was left to Clinton to rebalance the budget. Bush Jr took the Reagan-Thatcher free market credo to the point where in 2011 the US now hovers on default, up to its neck in debt to "Red China". In bankrupting the old USSR via military spending he started the same process at home.
George W Bush's wilful ignorance of the wider world easily trumped Reagan's though; compared with darlings of the Tea Party such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, Reagan's populism now looks cerebral. What would Reagan, always gallant to women, have thought of the movement he started? Easygoing conventional rebel that he was, he would have embraced it.
For helping bring down the Berlin Wall east Europeans are rightly grateful. They have put up three Reagan statues too. But he was less concerned with the oppressed closer to home in Latin America — or even blue collar America from which he sprang. The wages of "Reagan Democrats" stalled in the 80s and remain stalled as those of the rich, his adopted class, have not.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction" was one of Reagan's less complacent remarks and also features on the statue. Democracy and capitalism were inseparable, he also said. But modern China is both rich and unfree, America's creditor. Far from being the president who restored his country's morale, Reagan may yet be seen as the tipping point to decline.
It was not that much of what the assembled Reagan fan club claimed for his presidency was mere nostalgia – mutual reassurance for the Atlantic special relationship in an increasingly Pacific world – more that was it a bit pompous and self-important, as Reagan never was.
Even sculptor Chas Fagan's bronze, when it was finally unveiled, looked too formal and stiff to be right. You wanted to see the president with his feet up or sleeping (one of his favourite jokes) during a cabinet meeting – at very least to be smiling more broadly in this, his centenary year.
After all, it was his genius for affability, his willingness to laugh at himself, his corny jokes, his titanium-plated optimism, which made millions of Americans like Ronnie Reagan, even when many of them did not approve of what he was actually doing. Like JFK and – Republicans hate this comparison – Bill Clinton, Reagan had the ability to light up a room simply by entering it.
Standing for re-election in 1984 at the age of 73, he won 49 states. When he acknowledged his Alzheimer's condition 10 years later, his open letter to the US people ("I am one of million of Americans who will be afflicted …") was a model of grace. He died in 2004.
But no, the private ceremony in Grosvenor Square was a solemn occasion with a political purpose: the urgent need to proclaim the boy from smalltown Illinois "one of America's most admired and respected presidents" (Ambassador Louis Susman) and "without question a great American hero" (William Hague), the man who "brought millions of people to freedom as the iron curtain finally came down" (Margaret Thatcher).
Lady Thatcher was too fragile to make the journey from nearby Belgravia so early in the day, but her message was read and her (dubious) claim that "Ronald Reagan won the cold war without firing a shot" is inscribed on the statue's plinth. So if anyone shared the day's honours, it was her, though Sir Winston Churchill was also heavily name-checked.
Churchill's wartime ally, Franklin D Roosevelt, was a hated Democrat, which is awkward on tribal Tory/Republican occasions. But Reagan's talent for invention (his first career was as a radio sports reporter covering baseball games he was not actually watching: he was brilliant) overcame that difficulty. FDR, whose own statue stands across the square, was one of his early heroes and remained so. It was the Democrats who changed.
So Condoleezza Rice, the Republican former secretary of state, spoke of the Reagan-Thatcher partnership's mutual regard and "courage to act on their values". So did Hague, who was first elected an MP in the year Reagan left office, 1989. The foreign secretary called him a statesman, a shining optimist, a negotiator who turned America's cold war enemies into friends and negotiated away nuclear missile systems with Mikhail Gorbachev — the name conspicuously not mentioned as Reagan's brave and vital partner in detente.
The session, complete with US military band playing God Save the Queen and The Star Spangled Banner, was well attended by Old Guard Reagan Republicans and Thatcherite Tories — Michael Howard, George Osborne, Liam Fox, Eric Pickles deep in conversation (about the homeless?) with Iain Duncan Smith. Wellwishers with time and money on their hands turned up. So did younger Tory MPs hoping to inhale some of the Reagan stardust.
As if still mesmerised by what Reagan biographers called his "willed ignorance", his capacity to re-write the facts Hollywood-style, the Reagan Fan Club in Grosvenor Square recycled some innocent porkies on his behalf.
No, he was not inspired to turn Republican by Eisenhower in 1952, he was an FBI informer in the Hollywood actors' union long before that. And yes he may have been a declared enemy of big government, but he was also the first of the know-nothing, credit card Republican presidents who piled up deficits like drunken sailors.
Even his successor, George Bush Sr, called Reagan's high spend/low tax formula "voodoo economics". It was left to Clinton to rebalance the budget. Bush Jr took the Reagan-Thatcher free market credo to the point where in 2011 the US now hovers on default, up to its neck in debt to "Red China". In bankrupting the old USSR via military spending he started the same process at home.
George W Bush's wilful ignorance of the wider world easily trumped Reagan's though; compared with darlings of the Tea Party such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, Reagan's populism now looks cerebral. What would Reagan, always gallant to women, have thought of the movement he started? Easygoing conventional rebel that he was, he would have embraced it.
For helping bring down the Berlin Wall east Europeans are rightly grateful. They have put up three Reagan statues too. But he was less concerned with the oppressed closer to home in Latin America — or even blue collar America from which he sprang. The wages of "Reagan Democrats" stalled in the 80s and remain stalled as those of the rich, his adopted class, have not.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction" was one of Reagan's less complacent remarks and also features on the statue. Democracy and capitalism were inseparable, he also said. But modern China is both rich and unfree, America's creditor. Far from being the president who restored his country's morale, Reagan may yet be seen as the tipping point to decline.
