Nothing puts the so-called “special relationship” between the UK and the United States under strain like the Americans going to war.
At Prime Minister’s Questions, after Donald Trump’s “no Churchill” jibe, Sir Keir Starmer insisted the relationship was still alive and well.
He was challenged by a Conservative MP, Gareth Bacon, on whether his “dithering” had made the special relationship stronger or weaker.
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The prime minister was probably expecting Kemi Badenoch to punch the bruise of the president’s brutal tirade against him in the Oval Office.
But, inexplicably, she didn’t, instead making a rather silly joke about “a sea of orcs and goons” – a reference to Lord Of The Rings – on the Labour back benches.
So the PM was probably more than happy to get the chance to sound all statesmanlike and answer Mr Bacon with a powerful defence of the special relationship.
And, for good measure, he took the opportunity to deliver a subtle but effective riposte to the mercurial and erratic president’s “Churchill” onslaught.
“American planes are operating out of British bases,” said the PM. “That’s the special relationship in action.
“British jets are shooting down drones and missiles to protect American lives in the Middle East on our joint bases. That’s the special relationship in action.
“Sharing intelligence every day to keep our people safe. That’s the special relationship in action.”
And then came a withering put-down. “Hanging on to President Trump’s latest words is not the special relationship in action,” he concluded.
Note that the PM said the president’s “latest words”. After all, President Trump has changed his mind on the controversial Chagos deal several times.
It’s fair to say that never has a British prime minister faced such a tough challenge in maintaining the “special relationship” with a US president as Sir Keir has over the past year.
In his Oval Office salvo against the prime minister, the president said Sir Keir had been “very, very unco-operative” by initially refusing to allow the US to use the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands.
He didn’t mention it, but no doubt the president was also irked this week by Sir Keir’s dismissal in the Commons on Monday of “regime change from the skies”.
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In times of war, disputes between US presidents and British prime ministers don’t just happen between Republican presidents and Labour PMs or Democrats and Conservatives.
And it’s not always rosy between prime ministers and presidents of the two sister parties. There have been big fallings out: over Suez, Vietnam and the Caribbean island of Grenada.
It was Winston Churchill himself who first used the phrase “special relationship”, defining the alliance between the UK and the US in a speech in Missouri in 1946, in which he also coined the phrase “the Iron Curtain”.
That speech was introduced by president Harry Truman, a Democrat, with whom Churchill had attended the Potsdam Conference in 1945 to negotiate the terms of the end of the Second World War.
Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt. Pic: AP
Churchill also had a close relationship with another Democrat president, Franklin D Roosevelt, and their close bond during the Second World War was described as a friendship that saved the world.
But Churchill’s Conservative successor Anthony Eden fell out badly with the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower over the Suez Crisis in the mid-1950s.
Eisenhower bitterly opposed Eden’s botched attempts with France to regain control of the Suez Canal after its nationalisation and blockade by Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was the beginning of the end for Eden.
And it took until the early 1960s and the unlikely friendship between stuffy Harold Macmillan and charismatic John F Kennedy for the damage done to the special relationship by Suez to be repaired.
“Between them they had rescued the special relationship after the rupture of the Suez Crisis and done so at a time of uniquely high tensions around the world,” wrote British author Christopher Sandford in Harold And Jack, The Remarkable Friendship Of Prime Minister Macmillan And President Kennedy.
Harold Macmillan and John F Kennedy. Pic: AP
It was the early 1960s and they were dangerous times, rather like now, of course. Back then it was the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear weapons.
But it was a relationship abruptly cut short in 1963, by the demise of “Supermac”, caused by the John Profumo sex scandal and then JFK’s assassination in Dallas just a month later.
John F Kennedy with Harold MacMillan. Pic: AP
After Kennedy, the so-called “special relationship” was in trouble once again, when Labour’s Harold Wilson rejected pressure from US president Lyndon Johnson to send British troops to Vietnam.
And even though Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were ideological soulmates, Thatcher was furious when she wasn’t consulted before the Americans invaded Grenada, a commonwealth nation, in 1983 to topple a Marxist regime.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Pic: Reuters
Even worse, according to Thatcher allies, a year earlier Reagan had stayed neutral during the Falklands war. He wanted a negotiated settlement and didn’t want to humiliate Argentina. She was determined to recapture the islands.
Reagan said he couldn’t understand why two US allies were arguing over “that little ice-cold bunch of land down there”.
Sound familiar? On Tuesday in his broadside against Sir Keir in the Oval Office, President Trump called Chagos “that stupid island that they have”.
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Pic: Reuters
Bill Clinton’s political soulmate was Sir Tony Blair. They were as close as Reagan and Thatcher.
But it was with the Republican George W Bush that Labour’s Sir Tony embarked on the defining mission of his premiership, the Iraq War. It was to be the turning point of Sir Tony’s decade in Number 10.
He was branded a liar over claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, he was vilified by the Labour left, and Iraq haunts Labour to this day.
Tony Blair and George W Bush. Pic: Reuters
This week, as Sir Keir spent nearly two hours answering questions from MPs on Iran in the Commons on Monday, the spectre of Iraq again hung heavily over the Labour prime minister and his backbenchers.
In his statement, Sir Keir told MPs: “We all remember the mistakes of Iraq. And we have learned those lessons. Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis and a viable thought-through plan.”
A lawful basis and a thought-through plan. That sums up the current rift between the prime minister and the president over Iran.
And it’s the latest example that proves that for the much vaunted “special relationship” between the UK and the United States, wars spell trouble and in many cases threaten to put the relationship at risk.
