Special Relationship Fretting Special!

Could there be anything more juvenile than Fleet Street’s unanimous view that Gordon Brown has been embarrassed by Tony Blair “beating” him to an audience with Barack Obama? Sure, it’s always entertaining to dip back into the Blair-Brown psychodrama and everyone likes the idea of the PM watching Tone preach the word at the White House and throwing the TV remote against the wall in a fit of Presbyterian – “Bloody Tony uses the Good News Bible. He would, wouldn’t he? Good News! I ask you, what’s that? Not even a proper Christian. Cherie believes in crystals – fury…

But I digress. the point is that the view that it matters who “wins” the supposed “race” to meet Obama is laughably trivial. Yet bizarrely our newspapers treat it as a matter of national importance and as though the order in which Obama meets foreign leaders amunts to some kind of international league table of influence.