The US state department doesn’t like Cameron. He doesn’t mind that at all

David Cameron has never quite understood why so many of his Conservative colleagues are so keen on America. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he was bemused to watch close political friends applauding the Prime Minister’s alliance with the White House and, with it, the Iraq war. He still refers to them as ‘you neocons’, and has only half-jokingly applied this label to George Osborne, his shadow chancellor. Now he is finally adjusting the party’s position.

The formula which Charles Kennedy used during the Iraq war, that Britain should be a ‘candid friend’ to America, has in effect become the new Conservative policy. William Hague tells anxious colleagues this is a return to the Thatcher–Reagan era of candour. The ‘special relationship’, according to the shadow foreign secretary, is more than strong enough to withstand the occasional flow of harsh words across the Atlantic. But, from the other side of the pond, Mr Cameron’s shifting stance seems more like a covert attempt to tap into British anti-Americanism.