The Urak Hai of Politics

So, Reagan is no longer with us, although to be honest, he hasn't been with us for ten years or so. Alzheimers is a terrible thing, and no one would wish it on their worst enemy, or indeed the effects on their worst enemy's families.

That said, it is the politicians' lot, and the celebrity politicians even more so, to have their entrails picked over mercilessly, although to read much of the press coverage of Reagan's legacy, it seems that he, like Richard Nixon before him, has escaped rather lightly.

He was a strange old cove and no mistake. Probably the first celebrity politician of the modern era, he was some sort of Sarumanesque hybrid. "It is a politician, but one like you've never seen before. He is at home in front of the television cameras, he reads an autocue deftly and exudes an easy charm that makes even his enemies warm to him. What sort of fell beast is this?"

For the Free Marketeers and those of the Libertarian Right persuasion he is an iconic figure, single handedly (well, with a little help from his ally this side of the pond) bringing communism to it knees and bringing us Reaganomics. To others, his unwillingness in foreign policy to deviate from the my enemy's enemy is my friend mantra was enough to condemn him as a murderous old bastard by proxy. And if, as his admirers believe, his implacable hostility to communism did help rid the world of a cancerous evil, it also played its part in giving rise to another, in the shape of Bin Laden and his not so Merrie Men.

But just how crucial was Reagan's reckless defence spending and "Mr Gorbachev, tear down the wall" rhetoric in consigning Soviet Style Communism to the dustbin of history? If we imagine the Cold War as essentially a conflict between two economic models, one amoral and efficient, the other immoral (in a sense, since it was it was run by politicians, who always tend to immorality in the absence of the means to throw them out) and inefficient, there was always going to be one winner. And the gung ho admirers of Reagan surely have it exactly wrong when they try to make out it was his hostility that brought about the change, when actually it was his arms limitation and conciliatory attitude that allowed him to do business with Gorbachev, the greater architect of the end of the Cold War.

And then there's Reaganomics. Well, it's not a word you hear much these days, with good reason, since it amounted to little more than "Aw shucks, ain't taxes just the worse thing?" And in Reagan's folksy, homespun philosophy there was no room for a cautionary exhortation along the lines of "neither a borrower or a lender be," so by the end of his tenure he left a mountain of debt that would have sent your average rancher galloping off into the sunset.

Which is where we'll leave him.