World Notes DIPLOMACY

"Polite and businesslike" was the way White House Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater described last week's meeting between British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock and President Ronald Reagan. "Cool tending toward frosty" might have been more apt. The President criticized Labor's call for British nuclear disarmament, saying it not only hurt NATO but "undercut our negotiating position at Geneva."

Kinnock had no reason to expect warm amiability. After all, at the moment he was in the Oval Office, and a book of speeches by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was being prepared for April publication with a glowing foreword by the President. She is a woman of "unshakable inner confidence, even serenity" in the face of crisis, Reagan writes. Too bad, he adds, that Mrs. T. has to go through those "hostile sessions" in the House of Commons called Prime Minister's Question Time, when she is subjected to "heckling" by the opposition. Chief among Thatcher's tormentors, of course, is Neil Kinnock.