I don't know much about Thatcher, but I know Reagan. As President of the Screen Actor's Guild, he was a liberal and a Democrat. As his B-movie career circled the drain, he fell under the spell of Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, who sponsored Reagan's last gasp as an admitted performer. Soon the liberal Democrat was a conservative, supply-side Republican. His Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was the first right-winger to postulate that if he didn't believe it, it just couldn't be so, and facts be damned. Sound familiar?
Jack Welch's philosophy of business and the economy was summed up in one quote; "Corporations should be based on barges and towed from port-to-port depending on the lowest taxes and the most lax regulation." or something to that effect.
They all started the trend of letting the wealthy hide, shield and tax-shelter their ill-gotten gains. Now we have a huckster President who admires dictators and is likely in Putin's hip pocket for all he owes the Russians who bailed him out of a looming 8 BILLION dollar bankruptcy. Money sure talks loud while everything else is diminished, including The Constitution.
Reagan was also the architect of the fall of guaranteed-benefit pensions and the rise of common folk having their retirement in risky stock market adventures with little professional scrutiny and next to zero accountability. When you lose your ass in a pension, somebody goes to jail and the PBGC decides what leftover crumbs you get. When you lose your ass in a 401K, you just lose your ass.
As Reagan's senility set in, Nancy Reagan was the de-facto Chief of Staff, shielding Ronny from the prying eyes of the press and scheduling and screening his appointments via her astrologer. We didn't need him as President by that time because the oligarchs were quietly taking over the world and making cumbersome democracy obsolete.