Determined to continue the warm relations he enjoyed with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush on Monday playfully called Blair’s 56-year-old successor, Gordon Brown, “damn old.”
Bush made his quip after Brown remarked that “six of my Cabinet are under 40.”
“You must be feeling damn old then,” the 60-year-old president cracked.
But Brown, mindful that Blair was often mocked as Bush’s “poodle,” was less chummy than the president during a joint news conference at Camp David. While affable in demeanor, Brown avoided personal praise of Bush, preferring to emphasize “shared values” between the U.S. and Britain.
Still, those who expected the new prime minister to break with Bush over the Iraq war found precious little daylight between the two leaders on the volatile topic.
“Our aim, like the United States, is step by step to move control to the Iraqi authorities, to the Iraqi government and to its security forces,” Brown said. Bush, after meeting with Brown for the first time since he became prime minister, pronounced himself simpatico with the new leader.
“I find him to be resolved and firm and understanding about the stakes in this series of initial struggles in this war against extremists and radicals,” he said. “And the challenge for Gordon and me is to write a chapter, the first chapter in this struggle that will lead to success.”
Although Bush repeatedly referred to the prime minister simply as “Gordon,” Brown stuck with the formal “Mr. President.” Still, the Scottish-born leader graciously thanked Bush for inviting him to Camp David and even joshed with the president at one point.
“I think your understanding, if I may say so, of Scotland was enhanced by the fact that you went to Scotland, you told me, at the age of 14 and had to sit through a very long Presbyterian church service in which you didn’t understand a word of what the minister was actually saying,” Brown said with a smile.
Bush told the assembled journalists that Brown is “not the dour Scotsman that you described or the awkward Scotsman. He’s actually a humorous Scotsman.”
