Historians will have to revise an enduring legend from Margaret Thatcher’s time in office — that she fought tooth and nail with France.

Jacques Chirac, the former President, says in his memoirs that he was a big admirer of the “Iron Lady”, and that their friendship in the late-1980s made President Mitterrand envious. According to Mr Chirac, Prime Minister under Mitterrand, the British Prime Minister even confided her fears over the mental abilities of President Reagan, her closest ally.

Mr Chirac, 76, who spent 45 years at the top of French politics until 2007, disclosed the relationship with Baroness Thatcher in a hotly awaited first volume of autobiography released yesterday.

In Every Step Must be a Goal, published days after he was ordered to stand trial for corruption, Mr Chirac breaks with lifelong discretion. He settles accounts with rivals and talks of his private life — including the loss of his virginity with an Algerian prostitute.

The book, which recounts the period up to his election as President in 1995, is likely to add to the burst of popularity that the elder statesman is enjoying.

Mr Chirac writes affectionately about Mrs Thatcher, as she was then. She was a fierce and stylish defender of British interests in EU spending battles, but was always fair, he writes. “Her inflexible intransigence made her one of the most redoubtable personalities ... Her grandeur stemmed from her force of conviction. She did not impose her point of view, but used all her energy to convince. . .”

Under his premiership from 1986 to 1988, Britain and France enjoyed a honeymoon, he said.

“Our complicity even irritated François Mitterrand, who took umbrage in November 1986 at a Franco-British summit.”

Mr Chirac, the Gaullist leader, said that his views on Europe were closer to those of Mrs Thatcher than Mitterrand, a Socialist. In 1988, in the midst of one of her “hand-bagging” campaigns over EU spending, she agreed to “kick the matter into touch” to help Mr Chirac’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, he writes. In November 1987 Mrs Thatcher told him of fears for Reagan on the eve of a Washington summit at which Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, would agree to limit intermediate nuclear forces. “Ronald Reagan did not appear to her to be intellectually or physically up to a long bout of negotiation,” he writes.

The disclosure of such complicity between the pair undermines one of Mr Chirac’s most famous quotes of the period: after a heavy negotiating round with Mrs Thatcher in 1986, he asked aides: “What more does this housewife want from me? My balls on a plate?”

Mitterrand famously described Mrs Thatcher as “having the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe”.

Mr Chirac does not touch the sleaze allegations that sprang from his 18 years as Mayor of Paris and makes no mention of his reputed dalliances with a legion of women.

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