Matthew Dancona

On the road with Gordon in the search for hearts and minds

It was a gamble, more than Gordon Brown’s aides had cared to admit.

It was a gamble, more than Gordon Brown’s aides had cared to admit.

It was a gamble, more than Gordon Brown’s aides had cared to admit. Every last detail of the new Prime Minister’s press conference at Camp David had been planned, from the tone of the Prime Minister’s voice to the colour of his tie. The President’s team had taken issue with a few passages of Mr Brown’s text, and amendments were made. But it was not the content of the text that mattered. It was — well — the whole damn thing.

As we waited in the sweltering Maryland heat of Camp David, on a huge expanse of immaculate turf, a driving range doubling up as a helipad for three military choppers, a Marine asked if we were being looked after, whether we had been given sodas and cookies: Camp David is a naval base, so they welcome you ‘on board’ when you arrive. The rules are as old as the sea: you can have soda and cookies, but you can’t, for some reason, have snuff. No, sir.

Then, ambling over in their suits — a Brown demand, obligingly met by the First Host — were the President and Prime Minister. Bush kicked off in typical style with a tribute to Brown as ‘a principled man who really wants to get something done’, who, in his handling of the car bomb plot, had ‘proved your worthiness as a leader. And I thank you for that.’ Bush is big on thanking people, and I noticed that Brown picked up the habit during his US trip, thanking the President ‘for his leadership on Darfur’ the very next day in his speech at the UN.

But at Camp David the PM did something different, and altogether more daring. In response to the President’s off-the-cuff welcome, he delivered nothing less than a mini-speech (‘ladies and gentlemen’) on the character of the special relationship, Churchill’s vision of the ‘joint inheritance’, UN Resolution 1723, the Middle East Peace Process, and the ‘full and frank discussions’ that he and his host had held.

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