Ronald Reagan

Baroness Thatcher has led the tributes to Ronald Reagan at the former US president's funeral.

The former Conservative prime minister used a pre-recorded eulogy to hail the man she described as a "great American" and "a beacon to guide us".

She was in Washington on Friday to hear the address relayed to the service along with Tony Blair and Prince Charles.

As Margaret Thatcher she was in Downing Street for the entire length of Reagan's presidency from 1981 to 1989 and formed a close personal and professional friendship with the Republican leader.

The peer recorded a seven-minute tribute to her Cold War ally as she is no longer allowed to speak in public on doctors' orders.

"We have lost a great president, a great American, and a great man. And I have lost a dear friend," she said.

"In his lifetime Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself. He sought to mend America's wounded spirit, to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism. These were causes hard to accomplish and heavy with risk.

"Yet they were pursued with almost a lightness of spirit. For Ronald Reagan also embodied another great cause - what Arnold Bennett once called 'the great cause of cheering us all up'. His politics had a freshness and optimism that won converts from every class and every nation - and ultimately from the very heart of the evil empire."

Regularly describing him as "Ronnie", Baroness Thatcher revealed that they "talked regularly both before and after his presidency".

"And I have had time and cause to reflect on what made him a great president," she said.

"Ronald Reagan knew his own mind. He had firm principles - and, I believe, right ones. He expounded them clearly, he acted upon them decisively.

"When the world threw problems at the White House, he was not baffled, or disorientated, or overwhelmed. He knew almost instinctively what to do.

"When his aides were preparing option papers for his decision, they were able to cut out entire rafts of proposals that they knew 'the Old Man' would never wear."

Cold war

The former prime minister claimed Reagan foresaw the end of the cold war much earlier than others.

"His ideas, though clear, were never simplistic. He saw the many sides of truth," she said.

"Yes, he warned that the Soviet Union had an insatiable drive for military power and territorial expansion; but he also sensed it was being eaten away by systemic failures impossible to reform.

"Yes, he did not shrink from denouncing Moscow's 'evil empire'. But he realised that a man of goodwill might nonetheless emerge from within its dark corridors.

"So the President resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of these pressures and its own failures."

She concluded that people around the world would be both mourning and celebrating his life.

"With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world," she said.

"And so today the world - in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself - the world mourns the passing of the Great Liberator and echoes his prayer 'God Bless America'...

"We here still move in twilight. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had.

"We have his example. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children."