Roosevelt and Churchill sitting side by side. Reagan and Thatcher laughing together. Bush and Blair walking and talking. Trump and May holding hands. These simple images of US presidents and UK prime ministers invoke what the media calls the ‘special relationship’ between the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The supposed specialness of Anglo-American relations is the subject of ongoing critique by journalists, political theorists, military analysts and former members of government (see Aldous 2013; Coleman 2004; Langley 2014; McKercher 2017; Mumford 2018; Ratti 2018; Smith 1991; and Wheatcroft 2014). In their commentaries about the political and historical consequences of this transatlantic relationship, all of these writers devote some attention to the personal relationship between the two leaders. However, none pays significant attention to the role played by visual representations of the two leaders together in constructing the special relationship as a powerful cultural discourse. These images of the personalised relationship of the individual prime minister and president subsume the history and (inter)national politics of the transatlantic relationship under their representation of companionship and coupledom. This transmogrification is especially effective with two leaders like Thatcher and Reagan. In media images of these two together, their charismatic personas synergistically combine to confer a celebrity couple aura upon them.

This chapter argues that President Ronald Reagan, who served in office from 20 January 1981 to 20 January1989, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was in office from 4 May 1979 to 28 November 1990, are the most iconic representatives of the Anglo-American special relationship. This is in part because their closely aligned domestic policies to reduce the welfare state and increase the reach of laissez-faire free market capitalism during their concurrent terms in office established the neoliberal order of contemporary late capitalism. Though all subsequent presidents and prime ministers have accepted this state of affairs (with only some tweaking to the left or right), Thatcher and Reagan, together, represent its origin, as well as its entrenchment. Reinforced by their shared ideologies and political agendas, the unwavering myth that they had an intimate and happy personal relationship endowed the recurring images of their togetherness with the iconicity of a celebrity couple. Consequently, as I show below, both positive and negative representations of them deflected any substantive structural critiques of their neoliberal programmes because the political was subsumed into the personal.