Given the frequency with which he is favourably compared to the present incumbent of the White House, it is worth recalling what his contemporaries thought of Ronald Reagan. Mikhail Gorbachev told the Politburo that they were dealing with a "caveman". Margaret Thatcher turned to her Foreign Secretary after a meeting in the White House and said, tapping her head, "there is nothing there". George Shultz, the US Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989, told Reagan, after a summit with the Soviet Union: "You cannot just sit there telling jokes". The astonishing thing, though, is that, on the central issue of his time, Reagan was right and almost all his numerous moral and intellectual superiors were wrong. In 1983, he said that communism was a "sad bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written". Compare this prescience with a British ambassador who remarked in February 1985: "There's one thing we all know, the Soviet Union isn't going to change".