Don’t panic! This picture proves that the Special Relationship IS safe

Clue: Churchill is looking on in his rightful place

THE sight of Donald Trump and Theresa May holding hands on the colonnaded path from the Oval Office to the Rose Garden of the White House on their way to give their press conference on Friday has, predictably enough, had sections of the Leftwing press sneering. In fact, they held hands only momentarily as the President and Prime Minister negotiated a sharp dip on the path – I’ve walked along there myself; there ought to be a step – and to me it looked like gentlemanly act on the President’s behalf to make sure the Prime Minister didn’t stumble in her high heels. Which she didn’t.

She didn’t stumble politically either. For a lady for whom people skills are, frankly, not second nature, she charmed the hardened Washington elite, coming away with far more than even the most optimistic of her advisers could have hoped for.

‘We pledge our lasting support to the Special Relationship,’ stated President Trump in words that could have been written in the Foreign Office, even putting emphasis on the word ‘special’. For a man who tends to emphasize the wrong words in his scripted speeches, he was wordperfect at the Rose Garden.

Better than that, Mrs May even managed to put words into his mouth, stating that the president had said that he was ‘100 per cent behind Nato’, at which he did not demur. He also reined back on the reintroduction of enhanced interrogation techniques, another British desideratum from the talks. The photo-opportunity with the Churchill bust was also perfectly choreographed, and a standing rebuke to the previous occupant of the Oval Office who had banished it.

That said, can there have been an odder couple to open the next chapter of the Special Relationship than Trump and Mrs May? If, despite all of yesterday’s photo-op smiles and hand-holding, they don’t get on in the future, could that relationship be terminally damaged?

To succeed pre-eminently in public life, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once observed, it was necessary to conform to either the popular image of a bookie or a bishop.

HE HAD the image of the bonhomous, larger-than-life, quick-witted Winston Churchill versus the serious, earnest, Godfearing Lord Halifax in mind when he wrote it. Muggeridge’s Rule is even starker with Trump and Mrs May. She is the daughter of the manse; cautious, moralizing, and mindful of the effect of what she says. Trump is the camel-coated bookie on his soapbox shouting out the odds: noisy, attention-seeking, boisterous.

‘Haven’t you ever noticed,’ Mrs May told journalists on the plane to America, ‘sometimes, opposites attract.’ This at least acknowledged that she and Trump are total opposites, for what the clergyman’s daughter privately feels about Trump’s (admittedly off-the-record) remarks about where he liked to grab women is not hard to guess. Yet however much they take opposing sides on issues such as Russia, Nato, the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change and torture, neither they or anyone or anything else will seriously impede the onward march of Anglo-American amity.

The reason the Special Relationship has outlasted the individuals that occupy the White House and Downing Street – Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson clashed repeatedly over Vietnam, Heath and Nixon couldn’t stand one another, Thatcher thought Carter a weakling – is because there is such massive daily interaction between millions of Britons and Americans, which is immensely valuable to both countries historically, culturally, socially, financially, commercially, strategically and politically.

I have read the obituaries of many people who have written the obituary of the Special Relationship over the past three decades. Still today when it comes to intelligence sharing, military and nuclear co-operation, Britain being America’s largest foreign investor and America being Britain’s largest export market (twice the size of Germany), there are immutable, granite facts that more than half a century of anti-American sneering by the Left intelligentsia has been unable to alter. Britain sells more than £1billion of products per annum to the state of Ohio alone.

That Mrs May was the first world leader invited to visit the Trump White House, that the President has returned the bust of Churchill to its rightful place in the Oval Office, that he clearly has warm personal feelings towards Britain as well as business interests here, and that his mother was Scottish – all these things are to the good, but none of them matter compared to the long-lasting and multi-faceted Special Relationship.

Meanwhile Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies and undeniable oafishness – let alone his domestic policies to do with abortion, the Mexican border and Muslim immigration – pose no danger to the Special Relationship either.

His reference to Mrs May as ‘my Maggie’ might be a gross act of self-identification as the next Ronald Reagan, but let’s hope he’s right.

REAGAN and Thatcher’s relationship was key to the West’s victory over Soviet Communism, just as the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship created the grand strategy that brought victory to the Allies in Western Europe over the Nazis.

And anyway, ‘my Maggie’ is much less cringeworthy than George Bush’s ‘Yo, Blair!’ or Barack Obama calling David Cameron ‘bro’. The American congressman who described Mrs May as ‘Trump’s long-lost big sister’ might be on to something. Harold Macmillan felt he could exert a positive influence on American policy-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis through his friendship with President Kennedy, Thatcher told George H. W. Bush not to ‘go wobbly’ over the liberation of Kuwait, and Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago in 1999 encouraged George W. Bush to liberate Iraq.

If Mrs May were able to help persuade Trump to, in her words, ‘engage but beware’ Vladimir Putin, and to eschew isolationism, that would be positive too. Trump might believe in America First, but that doesn’t mean that Britain can’t be a close second. Imagine the prize of Trump actually carrying out his threat to slap 35 per cent tariffs on German car imports, at precisely the time Brussels is negotiating access to the Single Market after Britain triggers Article 50. The pressure from national governments and industries on the otherwisevengeful EU Commission to give Britain a favourable trade deal would be irresistible.

It’s a prize that Theresa May knows is worth pursuing. Turning a blind eye to the worst aspects of domestic Trumpery is a small price of pay.

In his speech about ‘The Few’ on August 20, 1940, Churchill ranged over the friendship and intimate connections between Britain and America, six years before he even coined the phrase Special Relationship.

‘I could not stop it if I wished,’ he told the Commons, ‘no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling alone. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.’ If Churchill couldn’t stop it, any future lack of personal chemistry between Trump and Mrs May certainly won’t.

Trump clearly has warm feelings towards Britain