As a thirty-something I wished I’d been young in the sixties, but with the passage of time, I got to think that being twenty-something in the eighties was not a bad deal either. April 1989, the City of London’s Guildhall, history in the making as Mikhail Gorbachev’s Zil cavalcade sweeps by to lunch there with Margaret Thatcher and captains of British industry. The crowd, the flags, the village that the City is, and these heavy motor cars ploughing through. The memory gets more thrilling the further back it recedes. Glasnost, perestroika, and later the Berlin Wall. Who’d have thought.
Cycle on to this week for a view of what monumental change agents these two leaders proved to be and how much closer by now some previously unfathomable arguments of ideology. Gordon Brown receives political foe Baroness Thatcher [1] for tea at Downing Street, and Gorbachev [2] is to be found selling glossy fashion hold-alls on the inside cover of The Economist. To borrow the coinage of a global insurance company [3], change happens. Not always at the pace or in the specifics wanted – change being messy – but happen it does. And as with the history of these two leaders from twenty years ago, burning platforms certainly help.