Brown has outsourced British foreign policy

Now we know. Until now, we Americans have been wondering whether we were witnessing from the new boy on the foreign policy stage a cock-up or a considered change in Britain’s policy towards the United States.

When Gordon Brown exclaimed that he would never have appointed the man who wears his hatred of the American president and the neoconservatives as ‘a badge of honour’ had he known how offensive Malloch Brown would be to George Bush and the Americans, there was an inclination to believe him, even though it taxed credulity to think the Prime Minister had been so badly briefed. When the Prime Minister ‘went out of his way to be unhelpful’, in the words of one participant at the Bush–Brown meeting in Camp David, there was some willingness to attribute Brown’s frosty behaviour to his need to placate the Labour Left by distancing himself from Tony Blair’s approach to the President, and to a natural Scottish reserve.