Harry Mount

Meghan Markle and the return of American Anglophilia

Prince Harry’s imminent wedding to Meghan Markle will reinvigorate the dying special relationship between Britain and America. It is a boost for the fading American regard for the monarchy.

In America, the mother country is increasingly the forgotten country – and it has been fading for a century, ever since the First World War. As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That, after the allied victory ‘America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a full stop’.

As the increasingly weaker party in the 242-year affair, we cherish the special relationship much more than the dominant partner. That great Anglo-American WH Auden – an exile to New York, born in York – got it right: ‘If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me’.

That was the state of the affair 12 years ago, when I was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph: my love for America wasn’t entirely reciprocated. Despite Tony Blair’s craven support of George W Bush, the British weren’t considered a major international player. The proportion of Americans with British ancestors was in steep decline. And I never once heard that hallowed phrase, ‘I so love your accent’.

I’d been brought up on the idea that America was a country of Anglophiles, of doe-eyed cheerleaders who went weak at the knees when you did a passable impression of Hugh Grant. No longer. Yes, there was the odd constitutional historian in a bowtie who cross-questioned me about the Glorious Revolution. And a charmingly polite miner in Sago, West Virginia, asked me if I knew the Queen while I remorselessly interrogated him about a close friend who’d just been killed in a mining disaster. But these were small islands of Anglophilia in a country whose eyes were turning from Britain and Europe towards China and the East.

The Atlantic has only grown wider since then.

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