Menace and a threat – how No10 purred!
Quentin Letts sees Obama show us who’s boss
WELL, that put us in our place. With shuttering of slow eyes, a languid delivery and a superior little drop of the chin, Barack Obama told us to stay in the European Union, or else.
Or what? Well, we could forget about any quick trade deal as an independent Britain. Join the line, buddy. If rash enough to vote for selfrule, we could forget about being a global player. America would talk to the Europeans first. But he did like the Queen. Not Boris Johnson, though. The US President did not mention the Mayor of London by name but it was clear Boris irritated the bejaysus out of him by suggesting some Kenyan Obama family grudge against the British Empire.
Mr Obama went into a moist, windy justification of why he had moved a bust of Churchill from his study in Washington DC. There were two of those busts and there was only so much table space in the White House for statues and he had wanted one of Martin Luther King to remind him of the black struggle, etc, etc.
If Boris was watching the press conference on the box, I bet he felt the most frightful worm by the end of it all.
The late-afternoon event was held at the Foreign Office in one of those ornately wallpapered state-rooms big enough for fivea-side footie.
David Cameron and Mr Obama stood at lecterns, as is the form; behind them, flags. To one side stood an Obama bodyguard surely seven foot tall.
A slow beginning. Mr Cameron, face in part-shadow, said ‘Barack and I’ about eight times. He kept announcing he was the President’s ‘friend’. Shades of the plover bird standing in the crocodile’s mouth.
Mr Obama said he had been to Windsor Castle for lunch and chauffeured by the Dook of Edin-buro. By the way, did you see the Queen’s head-scarf yesterday? Was it not magnificently ‘The League of Gentlemen’?
The President said the Queen was ‘a jewel’, which sounded almost Cockney. He had taken along one of his toughest staff members who had ‘ almost fainted’ with excitement on meeting Her Majesty.
The President, a sometime college lecturer, is not a fast or succinct talker. He addresses a room like a professor explaining plangent inevitabilities to some not entirely bright undergraduates. He carries a doleful air. Perhaps the presidency has weighed him down, its daily digest of global iniquity showing him man’s cruelties.
Regarding our EU referendum he did the formal thing of saying the choice was down to the Brit- ish people. ‘I’m not here to fix any votes’, he said – before trying to do exactly that as he cited John Donne’s line ‘no man is an island’ (ie, we needed the Europeans to make us strong).
He was commenting on the referendum not because Mr Cameron had begged him to in floods of tears. No. It was because Brexiteers had raised the possibility of a post-vote trade deal with the US, and he needed to tell us the facts of life. ‘The UK’s gonna be in the back of the queue,’ he said. Downing Street aides practically purred with delight. How they will love using this threat in their pro-EU campaign.
Dwelling on the economic repercussions for us of Brexit, Mr Obama said ‘that’s not something I’d probably do’. And then he gave his chin a defiant, curt litte drop. It was a movement that contained both menace and professorial superiority. A cold gesture.
FOR all the talk of the Queen and Churchill and the ‘special relationship’, this was a press conference with ice at its core. The White House will only ever pursue the US interest.
More than once yesterday Mr Obama, who will soon be history, used the word ‘leverage’. The dishonesty of yesterday’s event lay in its failure to admit Brexit could give us new leverage in the form of self-decided tax rates, agility and economic strength. And if that doesn’t work, we can always say we won’t buy Trident.