Reagan a "bozo" according to brits

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In the early1980s, senior members of the British foreign service were appalled by what they saw as the American president’s bumbling ignorance and lack of interest in world affairs.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were often portrayed as geo-political soul mates, but government files declassified in London on Wednesday expose a deep British disdain for the president who was described in official papers as homophobic, uninformed, disinterested and, not to put too fine a point on it, “a Bozo.”

The British Foreign Office files seen by The Daily Beast show that Prime Minister Thatcher was warned President Reagan had little interest in world affairs and was unable to sustain a serious conversation about contemporary politics.

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Successive British ambassadors in Washington were deeply unimpressed with the former California governor, however. Sir Nicholas Henderson, who was in the job when Reagan was elected, described him as a dogmatic and simplistic man. “He has clear-cut opinions, not to say prejudices, as was apparent to me when he told me à propos Keynes that it must not be forgotten that he was a homosexual,” Henderson wrote in his United States Annual Review of 1981.

Sir Oliver Wright replaced Henderson in Washington the following year but the dispatches he sent back to London were no more encouraging. “We have self-evidently a President—how shall I put it?—whom it is difficult to engage in a serious discussion on any subject of contemporary politics,” he wrote in October 1982.

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