‘Forget the special relationship. America is just not that into us’: a Spectator debate

Churchill popped up early at last week’s Spectator debate, which was sponsored by Brewin Dolphin.

Churchill popped up early at last week’s Spectator debate, which was sponsored by Brewin Dolphin. James Crabtree, the Financial Times’s comment editor, deplored the way our war leader’s bust had been ‘removed from the White House’ by an incoming Barack Obama. It marked the terminal point in a relationship that once shaped world events. America was looking east. Obama had pledged to run ‘a Pacific presidency’. Crabtree repeated Helmut Schmidt’s gag about our alliance with the Americans, ‘a relationship so special that only one side knows it exists’.

Nile Gardiner admitted that Obama was no lover of Britain, but he reminded us that the motion refers to America, not to any particular White House inmate, and Obama’s mid-term drubbing had shown how poorly he reflects ‘the spirit and heart of America’. Our friendship was ‘the world’s strongest alliance’.