Graham Stewart

Toughing it out together

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Since the Suez debacle, the chemistry between American presidents and British prime ministers has helped determine the ‘special relationship’s’ potency. Between Harold Macmillan and John F. Kennedy, as with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it was dynamic. Between Edward Heath and Richard Nixon, John Major and Bill Clinton, it was inert. Many commentators reasonably assumed London-Washington relations would go the same way in 2000 when Tony Blair’s best buddy, Clinton, vacated the White House and in swaggered George W. Bush.

To the horror of metropolitan opinion, Bush and Blair proceeded to form an alliance more controversial than any that had existed between their 20th-century predecessors. Its full effects will take decades to appraise.

The catalyst, of course, was 9/11 and the War on Terror it unleashed. Yet, as Con Coughlin, the distinguished author of Saddam: The Secret Life, convincingly shows in his new book, American Ally, Blair had decided it was his duty rather than a choice to get on with the leader of the world’s hyper-power. In this he had Clinton’s blessing, the outgoing president telling him to be a friend to his successor. Blair’s house-warming present for Bush was the loan of Jacob Epstein’s bust of Winston Churchill. It has pride of place in the Oval Office.

What did the Labour leader and the Republican Texan have in common? Coughlin has interviewed them separately for his book and they both mention the same qualities in the other — straight- forwardness and a determination to see an enterprise through to its conclusion. As Bush puts it, ‘In politics, you find people all the time, they say, I’m going to do this with you, and then the heat gets on and they turn and run.’ No names are mentioned.

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