Skipper

Caitlin Moran in her Times today, has some fun with the soi disant US-UK 'special relationship'. A pretty senior State Department official, Kendal Myers, has described it as 'totally one sided' and Britain's role as a bridge between the US and Europe as 'disappearing before our eyes.' 'We typically ignore them' he said of our efforts to influence US policy, 'and take no advice- it's a sad business'. He went on to admit to being ' a little ashamed' at the way Bush had treated Blair, given how much our man has invested in standing by the USA after 9-11. 'There was no payback, no sense of reciprocity' he concluded.

So it seems we needed to wait until the State Department itself, told us what we had long known anyway: the 'special relationship', if it ever existed, is no more, it is defunct and Blair's continuing attempt to use US power by proxy to fulfill his messianic visions doomed to failure. The price has been humiliation for poor Tony ('Yo Blair') and the sad neglect of what should be our foreign policy priority, Europe, and the long term goal of making it a genuine centre of power and influence to protect collective interests and work towards the goals of peace and security worldwide.

It might be argued that the 'special relationship' never existed anyway once the last world war ended. The US was quick to put an end to favourable economic concessions and a decade later allowed her historic ally to be humiliated by the Suez debacle. OK, we received belated support during the Falklands War in the shape of intelligence and we may or may not have received privileged CIA intelligence in more recent years... for example, all that stuff about Saddam having WMD...No, I'm very doubtful about anything being 'special'; indeed it could be argued that Britain, has received very little in exchange for its faithful support for the USA through thick and thin and that the real recipient of very special treatment is not the us, UK, but Israel. Moran suggests that as we have been 'dumped' by the USA we should set our cap at another cute looking transatlantic object of desire: Canada.