Barack Obama, as my Examiner colleague Byron York has noted, has been snubbing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. This strikes me as highly regrettable and foolish in the extreme. Does Obama have some gripe against the British related to his Kenyan colonial heritage? If so, it’s time to get over it. Britain has been by and large an exemplary ally. It is one of the few nations in the world with a significant out-of-area military capacity, it maintains constructive ties with its former colonies through the Commonwealth, it shares with us an Anglospheric heritage based on common law and individual freedom which is of priceless value.
All that said, perhaps Obama is acting on the observation that Brown is in terrible political trouble and is very probably a lame duck prime minister. That’s no justification for snubbing Brown, who will almost certainly remain prime minister for most of the next year, and it risks raising resentment against the United States in Brown’s Labour party, whose governments have been strongly supportive of the United States, especially in the early years of the Cold War, when Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin bravely supported Harry Truman’s lonely and brilliantly successful decision to maintain the Berlin airlift, as chronicled in Andrei Cherny’s wonderful book, The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour.
All that said, Brown’s political plight is dreadful. He must call a general election before May 2010, and current polling shows his Labour party trailing the Conservatives by a 40.5%-25.9% margin, with 18.7% for the Liberal Democrats. This would translate to something like a 366-208-45 margin in the House of Commons, an almost precise reversal of the 346-208-67 Labour margin after the 2005 general election. Matthew D’Ancona, editor of the Spectator and longtime political columnist who has excellent sources on all political sides in Westminster, takes a withering lookin his Sunday Telegraph column at Labour’s plight. British political writing at its most elegant.
