(UK) Spectator: Hail to the Chief

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-11-15&id=3728

(The Spectator is a long standing (since 1828), mainly right wing magazine - its editor is a Tory MP, and it's owned by Conrad Black. This is its cover story).
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Not so this time. Buckingham Palace is not equipped to cope with George Bush. The 100 new telephone lines and elaborate satellite networks that inevitably accompany an American president are causing dismay. One courtier expressed alarm that they will disrupt domestic communications in the palace, above all committing the cardinal sin of interfering with the Queen’s favourite viewing, Channel Four Racing and Coronation Street. A palace source says that White House security men wanted a Black Hawk helicopter, identical to the gunships used in the Gulf war, hovering above the palace throughout the period of the presidential occupation, ready to shoot down with awesome fire-power any suicide bomber or terrorist seeking to crash a plane into Buckingham Palace. The Queen rejected the idea on the grounds that it would be ‘too noisy’.
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The signs are that the White House has involved itself intimately in the detail of the policing of the demonstration set for Thursday 20 November. The Stop the War Coalition, which has organised half a dozen demonstrations in the past two years, all of them peaceful, has always enjoyed easy relations with the Metropolitan Police. But its spokesman Andrew Burgin says that everything has suddenly become much more difficult. He claims that he has been told privately by Met officers that the White House is intervening heavily in the decision-making process. The crucial new element is the refusal to allow protesters to march past Parliament and up Whitehall. Burgin hints that this prohibition, not enforced in any of the other anti-war marches, could have violent consequences. ‘If you have to do a route which takes marchers away from the seat of power,’ says Burgin, ‘people will feel thwarted. That lays the foundation for problems.’

Hostility to the war has converted this state visit into a furtive occasion, with the President scuttling around here and there and making his arrivals unannounced. So great are the difficulties of staying in London that Windsor Castle, constructed to withstand assault, was proposed as a presidential bolthole, only to be rejected in the face of lack of enthusiasm from the palace.
<snip>
Other arrangements are still confused. The White House irritated No. 10 by insisting on a flatteringly long meeting with Iain Duncan Smith, only to be baffled when he suddenly ceased to be Tory leader. The President was yet more baffled by the emergence of Michael Howard, with whom a meeting has been hastily set up. Attempts by Downing Street to make the case for a meeting between Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy and the US President were eventually successful. The President has, however, asked specially that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, should make an appearance during his visit. George Bush has conceived a fondness for ‘that guy Campbell’, to whose fund for Leukaemia Research he has contributed.


Sounds like Dubya's press briefings haven't been keeping him up to speed. I wonder if he even heard of the Hutton inquiry? It'd be interesting to know what he and Kennedy will say (Kennedy's not an 'attack' type of politician, so although his party opposed the Iraq invasion, it'll probably be fairly mild), or if Bush even knows that the Lib Dems were opposed to the war at all. I wonder if this was a move to persuade Bush to give Blair more support - make him aware there's a party with significant support to the left of Blair, as well as the Tories, so Bush better not transfer support to the Tories, or the LibDems might get a toehold in government by taking more centrist votes?