Margaret Thatcher is too canny a politician to embroil herself in the American election. She has been happy to entertain those like Rudolph Giuliani who, in the absence of Ronald Reagan, have traveled to London to establish a personal link with conservatism’s golden age, but she has kept her own counsel about who she prefers in the Republican race.

Although she has not reached out to John McCain, all evidence suggests that she would not spend much time questioning his conservative credentials. In many ways Mr. McCain is like Airey Neave, one of her most important early backers and her campaign manager in the contest against prime minister Edward Heath from which she emerged Conservative leader.

Like Mr. McCain, Neave was a military hero and a prisoner of war. After capture by the Germans at Calais in 1940, he was incarcerated in the notorious prisoner camp Colditz, from where he organized a string of escapes, including his own. On his second attempt, Neave became the first British serviceman to spring himself from Colditz and make a “home run” back to Britain.

Like McCain, Neave was a maverick rather than an ideological conservative. He became convinced, however, that the Conservatives should move away from the post-war consensus which had narrowed their differences with Labour and he was among the first to spot Lady Thatcher’s potential as a forceful politician capable of leading her party.

In other respects, Lady Thatcher’s record in government suggests that she would sympathize with many of the policies which have caused Senator McCain to fall foul of American conservatives. His attitudes on taxes, on immigration, on social issues are close to her own views.

The first time Lady Thatcher visited Reagan in the White House, in February 1980, she arrived in an economic storm. She was a fiscal conservative who believed that the government spending deficit was holding back Britain’s entrepreneurial potential.

But, faced with huge government borrowing and spending, she resisted those who begged her to drastically slash income tax to kick start the economy, favoring instead large and painful cuts in public spending and a series of tax increases to bring state expenditure into line with tax revenues.

While Reagan greeted Lady Thatcher on the South Lawn as a friend and ally, many American fiscal conservatives on Capitol Hill were openly questioning the wisdom of her decision to raise taxes. Mr. McCain, too, finds himself in trouble because he queried President Bush’s decision to cut taxes for the wealthy without trimming government spending.

But, as a fiscal conservative, he has also opposed the president’s measures taken to alleviate the prospect of a recession. His view, like that of Lady Thatcher, is that good money should never be thrown after bad, and that the Keynesian solution to bolstering demand by cutting taxes for the less well off is only storing up trouble for later.

Immigration is a hot issue in Britain as it is in America. Yet Lady Thatcher kept well away from the treacherous waters that surround the subject. She learned her lesson from a single utterance when she suggested that some in Britain felt they may be “swamped” by immigrants. Use of the word “swamp” was considered by many, including many of her dearest supporters, as likely to be interpreted as racist.

Lady Thatcher had seen her mentor, the conservative thinker and Cabinet minister Enoch Powell, commit political suicide when he warned that too much colored immigration would lead to violence in the streets, what he, quoting Virgil, described as “rivers of blood,” and she was not prepared herself to become mired in an issue which could prove so deadly.

On social issues, Lady Thatcher would be considered liberal to most American conservatives, including Senator McCain. He has criticized Christian leaders for exerting too much influence in the Republican party.

Unlike Mr. McCain, who believes Roe v. Wade to have been a mistake and who would like to outlaw same-sex marriages, Lady Thatcher did nothing to try to rescind Britain’s liberal abortion and gay rights laws, nor was her attitude to homosexuals and others who challenge traditional social arrangements anything other than understanding.

Legislation to bar homosexual teachers from proselytizing was smuggled into her program without her knowledge. Her close retinue included at least one gay, who wrote all her most memorable lines, and a cocaine addict, whose problem she met with maternal indulgence.

However, it is Senator McCain’s strength on national security that would likely prompt Lady Thatcher’s endorsement. She discovered during the Falklands War, and in her battles against Soviet communism alongside Reagan, that lawlessness and terror should be met head on with all the force the state can muster. She could never countenance defeat.

As part of the Gulf War coalition which liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s occupation, she and President George H. Bush determined not to drive on to Baghdad. But all that she has said since George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq suggests that she was in favor of deposing the tyrant and that she is not prepared to countenance a military defeat. Senator McCain’s “surge” proposal, and its subsequent success, is a path Lady Thatcher would have gladly followed.

Perhaps most of all, Lady Thatcher would see in Mr. McCain a maverick, like herself, often at odds with his own party but so certain of his direction that he is prepared to suffer the consequences. Lady Thatcher has never been a panderer, nor a courtier, nor a conformist. Like Reagan, she always preached conservatism, even when she was affecting a compromise with those who disagreed. In Mr. McCain she would undoubtedly recognize a person after her own heart.

nwapshott@nysun.com