My piece in the Daily Mirror today following David Cameron's article in the Wall Street Journal, asserting that "I am hard-headed and realistic about US-UK relations. I understand that we are the junior partner—just as we were in the 1940s and, indeed, in the 1980s":
Finally! Why did it take a Tory prime minister to put in its place the so-called special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom? The short answer is the Iraq war - but I'll get to that later.
The fact is that the special relationship has been a crumbling anachronism for two decades. The long goodbye began at the end of the Cold War, when, amid Britain's slow economic and geopolitical decline, Washington cast its gaze across the Pacific toward Asia.
Having lived here since 1996 and been a dual citizen since 2004, I've been both sentimental and uneasy about the bittersweet relationship.
Sentimental? After 9/11, a handwritten note was slipped through my family's Victorian letter box in London as we tried to come to grips with what had happened back in New York.
The note, which was so lovely and, I think, British in its kindness, was from our neigh-bours. "I can see the lights on in your house, but I don't want to disturb you. Be assured you are surrounded by friends." It was signed, "With love, Sandy and David."
Uneasy? Tony Blair tarnished the special relationship for me and, more importantly, for the United Kingdom. He was truly close to Bill Clinton, with w h o m he shared a modernising, centre-left ideology; Blair had tears in his eyes at Warwick University in December 2000, when Clinton came to Britain to speak one last time as President.
But for Blair the relationship with America was much more than personal. He saw it as a way of magnifying post-imperial Britain's role in the world. Then along came President George W Bush and Iraq. Blair's star fell from the sky. The special relationship became a joke.
If you know only one thing about the relationship it is this: its importance depends upon which end of the telescope you view it through. It's a big deal viewed from Britain. But from the US, for better or worse, it's a speck on the horizon.
A caricature Cameron - an anti-European Eton toff slavishly beholden to the American behemoth - might well have wallowed in the familiar territory as the heir to Margaret Thatcher, who with Ronald Reagan presided over the high point of the post-war special relationship in killing off Communism.
To his credit, he didn't.
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