David Miliband Makes a Fool of Himself

I’m not convinced I share James’s view that David Cameron’s “1940 moment” counts as a howler, far less a “quite spectacular mistake” (and I suspect James doesn’t really think it that either). It’s pretty obvious that the Prime Minister simply slipped-up. I think he knows that in 1940 the United States had yet to enter the war and that it’s abundantly obvious that he meant to say that the UK was the US’s junior partner “in the 1940s”.

We know this because in his interview with Sky News Cameron was repeating lines he used in his Wall Street Journal column this week in which he wrote:

I am hard-headed and realistic about U.S.-U.K. relations. I understand that we are the junior partner—just as we were in the 1940s and, indeed, in the 1980s. But we are a strong, self-confident country clear in our views and values, and we should behave that way.