Blenheim’s glorious pageantry trumps the feeble protests
SO MUCH for those threats of a ‘carnival of resistance’. It was a spectacular carnival of pageantry which greeted Donald Trump last night as he finally paid his first presidential visit to the UK.
On the magnificent forecourt of Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace, our greatest non-royal residence, the American President was feted with a stunning personalised twilight parade and recital by the Massed Bands of the Household Division.
Short of Trooping the Trump Colour, this was about as good as it gets for a visiting leader. It concluded with bagpipes from the land of Mr Trump’s mother’s birth serenading the President with a peerless Amazing Grace, before he was led in to dinner by Theresa May.
And in they went hand-in-hand, just as they had walked in to the White House on their first meeting.
Last night’s affair was the quasi-state banquet for what was originally supposed to have been a state visit.
At least it involved a bona fide palace and royal music (the bands of the Scots, Irish and Welsh Guards plus the Countess of Wessex’s String Orchestra).
The arrival of Donald and Melania Trump was even heralded by the state trumpeters of the Household Cavalry – last seen on American telly welcoming another American citizen, Meghan Markle, to her own wedding in May.
As with Windsor Castle, here was another unbeatable global advertisement for the British tourist industry.
Inside the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, the President was treated to an impeccably patriotic dinner of Scottish salmon, Hereford beef and strawberries and (Cornish) clotted cream. The birthplace of Winston Churchill could hardly have looked more regal, Vanbrugh’s Cotswold stone grand entrance bathed in the honeyed glow of a perfect summer evening.
This is a stately home which remains in fabulous condition thanks, in part, to an earlier American billionaire ( William Vanderbilt, the Victorian railroad tycoon, whose daughter Consuelo married the debtridden ninth Duke).
The royal component of this trip will come today when the Trumps fly in to Windsor for tea with the Queen before disappearing to the President’s Ayrshire golfing resort for the weekend. After all the squawking, he is finding the natives here are not nearly as hostile as had been predicted.
Earlier, his Marine One helicopter descended on the US ambassador’s lawn in London to be greeted by two Palestinian protesters plus one dog and a shouty man pushing a bicycle, all gathered on the other side of a heavily policed security fence.
By yesterday evening, as the first organised demonstration against this tour assembled outside Winfield House, the US Embassy residence, the numbers had increased to around 100 people with whistles, tambourines, Socialist Worker placards and ‘Stop The War’ signs.
WEHAD been promised a ‘wall of sound’. However, the banging of a dozen saucepans and a modest chant of ‘f*** Trump’ was soon drowned out by the sound of Marine One taking off again as Donald and Melania set off for Blenheim Palace.
Despite all the much- hyped opposition to this visit in the capital, I counted considerably more people queuing up earlier outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum, round the corner in Baker Street.
The largest crowd in this part of the capital yesterday was the line for the waxworks at Madame Tussauds. The fake Donald Trump, thus far, has proved a bigger draw than the real thing.
It is now a year and a half since Theresa May visited Washington with an invitation for a full state visit. That it has been downgraded to a short ‘working’ visit and taken so long to arrange has been largely down to the visceral hostility of the British Left and assorted pressure groups.
By announcing that our most important ally is ‘not welcome’ in Britain, public figures such as the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Liberal Democrat leader, Vince Cable, have hardly made Britain an appealing destination.
In the meantime, other leaders, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, have been more than ready and willing to woo Mr Trump, regardless of his Twitter outbursts and trade wars.
By letting exaggerated threats of civil disorder dictate the arrangements for this week’s visit, the British Government may conclude that it has been missing a trick as it attempts to forge a postBrexit future. The last time that Mr Trump landed in Britain was on the very day that Britain voted to leave the European Union. As soon as he arrived at his Turnberry golf resort that morning, he announced that Brexit would be ‘beautiful’, and he has remained a firm fan ever since.
However, the fabled transatlantic ‘special relationship’ has not felt this unspecial for years – not even in early 2016 when President Barack Obama branded David Cameron’s foreign policy ‘a s*** show’. We probably have to go back to the 1960s, when President Lyndon B Johnson called Harold Wilson ‘a creep’ for his non-participation in the Vietnam War, to find the bilateral atmosphere as lukewarm as this. Some might go as far back as Suez.
It is proving to be a pretty dull week for the presidential chauffeur. The President is hardly trav-
elling by limousine at all due to fears of protesters.
No sooner had Air Force One landed at Stansted Airport yesterday afternoon, fresh from the Nato summit, than the President instantly transferred to his helidynasty, copter. He then flew directly to Winfield House, the sumptuous home of successive US ambassadors in north London on the edge of Regent’s Park. It was pure action-movie stuff. Marine One was preceded by a pair of Boeing Ospreys, grey half-winged, half rotary hybrid monsters, each sounding like a flying tank.
The current tenant of Winfield House, Woody Johnson, top tier Trump supporter and member of the Johnson & Johnson detergent had laid on a garden party to welcome his Commander in Chief and the First Lady. Expats and embassy staff gave him a rousing welcome as the sound of classic pop hits – including Hey Jude and the Village People’s YMCA – wafted over the security fence.
From my perch in the undergrowth, I could hear snatches of the President’s speech thanking American diplomats ‘for your crucial role with one of our most important allies’.
Once he had finished speaking, the music switched to more presidential tunes – Hail To The Chief and The Liberty Bell. Modest protests then started forming outside Winfield House and the gates of Blenheim Palace. The President will have heard none of them.
Perhaps on his way to Blenheim, someone may have pointed out Hammersmith in the west London suburbs. There, a popular local pub, The Jameson on Blythe Road, has been renamed The Trump Arms. Landlord Damien Smyth – an Irishman married to a New Yorker – tells me that he finally decided to rebrand his pub and swathe it in the Stars and Stripes following the decision by the mayor of London to allow the inflatable ‘Trump baby’ balloon to fly over Parliament Square, as it will this morning. ‘It’s a disgraceful decision. Imagine how offended we would be if the Americans did that to the Queen?’ he tells me, as we sit alongside a lifesize cardboard cutout of Mr Trump.
‘If they want to have their little protest, we’ll have our little party.’
MRSmyth says that trade has rocketed so much since the change of name that he is thinking of making it permanent. ‘We had a few nasty calls to begin with, but now it’s all Brits and Americans ringing up all the time to say thank you,’ he says. ‘People feel very strongly that this country might not even be here today if it hadn’t been for the USA.’
Larger demonstrations are planned in London this afternoon. They can make all the noise they like. By then, Mr Trump will be at an even grander palace than last night’s venue – Windsor Castle.