John Rentoul: New ways of speaking to a 'special' friend

David Cameron and Barack Obama were both said to have more style than substance. The opposite is proving true


John Rentoul: New ways of speaking to a 'special' friend
Sunday, 18 July 2010

Two years ago, David Cameron was introduced to the American people on the front cover of Time magazine, which asked: "The UK's next leader?" Then, the assumption was that he would sweep to power at the head of a majority Conservative government. This week, he arrives in Washington for his first visit as Prime Minister, and his first task is to explain what a Liberal Conservative is. To American ears, it makes as much sense as a Republican Democrat.

In a new interview with Time, Cameron says of the word "liberal" that it "means slightly different things on this side of the Atlantic". He explains that he leads a coalition of two parties who agree on a lot, and in which "the Liberals put greater emphasis on freedom, perhaps the Conservatives put greater emphasis on responsibility". He knows, though, that he faces a bigger task of explanation and recalibration this week.

It goes without saying that his visit will be accompanied by screeds of angst in the British press about the future of the special relationship, a phrase in which the word special has about as much meaning as it does on a supermarket offer. It goes without saying that his visit will go almost unnoticed by the US media, for whom UK politics consists of a vivid memory of someone called Tony Blair, whose memoir, A Journey, is about to hit the market.

Yet Cameron knows that his relationship with Barack Obama is one of his most important. The US-UK relationship is, as Professor Peter Hennessy reminded an audience of retired spies and mandarins last week, a particularly prime ministerial one. It is a relationship built on intelligence and nuclear weapons co-operation, the foundations of the secret state. And it is a relationship that has made or broken a succession of British prime ministers. Eden destroyed his premiership by going behind America's back at Suez. Wilson judiciously survived by resisting US pressure to join the war in Vietnam. Margaret Thatcher put reinforced concrete joists under her reputation as joint victor of the Cold War by her alliance with Ronald Reagan. And the rest, as they say, is contemporary history.

The importance of the relationship to Cameron was underlined symbolically by one of his first acts as Prime Minister, setting up an American-sounding National Security Council. As Hennessy said, it is an idea whose time has come, even if it first came in 1904. He described the NSC as, in effect, Arthur Balfour's Committee for Imperial Defence "with a bit more IT". But it marks an understanding of how important the War Formerly Known As The War Against Terror will be to the Cameron government, a war in which Britain and the US will continue to be close if not equal partners.



unhappycamper comment: This also explains why the Brits continue to trash their economy pursuing our goals (whatever they may be) in Afghanistan.