Very Special Relationship

Theresa May is not one of those many people. Nor is the current ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch, a diplomat with thirty years’ experience. He arrived only last January and must now be wondering whether it is time to start packing.

May has declared that there is no room for a “third party” in the transatlantic marriage, but she is powerless to stop Nigel and Donald from meeting. They have so much in common. Farage claims to represent the 52 percent of British voters who did not want to be ruled by the opaque and corrupt EU, and Trump the 52 percent of Americans who did not want to be ruled by Hillary Clinton.

Farage beat the path from business to politics that Trump has followed. Before launching UKIP and forcing the most dramatic events in recent British history, Farage worked as a commodities trader in the City of London. In the Brexit referendum, he ran a successful populist campaign against the “elites,” mass immigration, an allegedly corrupt media, and the leaders of the established right-wing party. He derides professional politicians as incompetent frauds and calls British politics a “cesspit.”

Farage is not a member of May’s cabinet. Nor does he hold UKIP’s solitary seat in Parliament. His essential contribution to the Brexit revolt did not lead to a role in Brexit negotiations. Even Conservative Euroskeptics seem to have expected that Farage, having persuaded a rabble of English deplorables to vote on their behalf, would go back to the fringe. Less than two weeks before the U.S. election, the BBC aired a comedy special called Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back. It lampooned Farage as a man without a cause or a party: delivering speeches at the bar of his local pub and watching politically incorrect seventies sitcoms in his slippers.

Meanwhile, Farage won at the game whose rules he has torn up. Farage was the only British politician to support Trump’s campaign. In August, Farage addressed a Trump rally in Jackson, Mississippi. Trump introduced him as “the man behind Brexit” and promised “Brexit plus, plus, plus” for America.

“After I did my bit, he did say to me, you’ll be my friend for life,” Farage said in September. On November 12, four days after Trump’s victory, Farage was the first foreign politician to consult with the president-elect in Trump Tower.

“Trump likes the U.K., talks about his mother’s Scottish birth, owns golf courses here, and is entirely comfortable with our culture,” Farage wrote in the hours after Trump’s victory. “More importantly still, he supported Brexit, and he says post-Brexit Britain will be at the front of the queue when it comes to trade relationships. What a pleasant change this will make from Obama and Clinton, who have looked down and sneered at us.”

Theresa May was the tenth foreign leader to speak with Trump on the phone. Perhaps this is because she and her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, have sneered at Trump—though not without reason. In December 2015, Trump suggested suspending Muslim immigration into the United States. May, then David Cameron’s home secretary, criticized Trump as “divisive, unhelpful and wrong.” Trump also asserted that there were “places in London and other places that are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives.” Johnson, then London’s mayor, accused Trump of “playing the game of the terrorists and those who seek to divide us.”

“I think he’s betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States,” Johnson said. “I would invite him to come and see the whole of London, and take him round the city—except I wouldn’t want to expose any Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

Ruth Davidson, a Conservative member of the Scottish Parliament, attacked Trump with Britain’s tactical weapon of last resort, the Complete Works of Shakespeare. “Trump’s a clay-brained guts, knotty-pated fool, whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch,” Davidson tweeted, reworking Prince Hal’s upbraiding of his debauched retainer Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I.

“Donald Trump is a chump,” tweeted Fiona Hill, one of May’s two chiefs of staff at the time. May’s other chief of staff, Nick Timothy, did not pick up the Shakespearean gauntlet, but made his opinion equally clear. “Urgh,” he replied, “as a Tory I don’t want any ‘reaching out’ to Trump.”

Now May is reaching out, and Johnson tweets that he is “looking forward” to working with the Trump administration on “global stability and prosperity.” Will Trump work according to stable precedents? In the Farage case, the first time since the election that Trump has addressed a close ally’s internal politics, the president-elect appears to be following the protocols of business. The loyal are rewarded, the disloyal dismissed. Those who failed to get in on the ground floor face a long trudge up to the penthouse.

Nobly, Farage consented to entertain Trump’s ambassadorial suggestion for the good of Britain. “It’s not his to offer, but it’s a very flattering comment,” Farage told Britain’s ITN News on Tuesday. “This is entirely up to the British government. If they assess that I could be of some value, and that perhaps I can build some bridges between Mr. Trump and indeed members of his team, many of whom I know well—if they think that’s in the national interest, then I could do something constructive.”

There is no formal precedent for one state selecting another state’s ambassador, but there is a long history of “informal diplomacy.” Not all of its precedents are those of the medieval court or the mafia movie, where power is personal and sustained by family loyalties and quasi-feudal patronage. In Anglo-American relations, informal and personal connections have always counted. Elizabeth II’s state visits are exercises in soft power. George VI served in Churchill’s charm offensive against FDR, submitting with good grace to a dinner of hot dogs at Hyde Park in June 1939. Before that, Dana Cooper argues in Informal Ambassadors (2014), American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy helped to create the Anglo-American alliance in the early 20th century, through “uncompromised and unlimited access” to the men who formulated foreign policy. One of those women, Jennie Jerome, also gave birth to Winston Churchill, who coined the phrase “Special Relationship.”

The problem is not just that Farage is constitutionally undiplomatic, or even that his idea of Brexit surely differs from that of May, who voted to Remain but now insists that “Brexit means Brexit,” or of Johnson, who hedged for years before campaigning to Leave. The problem, in the words of one of Farage’s tweets, is that “The world has changed.”

Jennie Jerome lived in the dark ages before Twitter and the Internet. Trump’s tweet disrupted the domestic politics of a close ally and undermined its leader’s authority at a time when its political and economic future is in the balance. What will happen when a president, from pique or from principle, does this to America’s rivals and enemies?

Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, teaches politics at Boston College.