It’s hard not to feel sorry for Christian Turner, the UK’s new ambassador in Washington. He’s only been in post three months, yet he’s already had to handle a string of bilateral crises – none his fault. US-UK relations are under intense strain over Iran, Ukraine and now the Falklands. And the Jeffrey Epstein stench still lingers thanks to his predecessor, Peter Mandelson.
The King’s visit was meant to gloss over all that unpleasantness. Word went round last week that a grateful Donald Trump would pack King Charles and Camilla off and promptly declare the US-UK trade deal had been finalized.
Then, on Tuesday, the first morning of the visit, news broke of a leaked tape. Back in February, in his second week in the job, Turner had told some schoolchildren that the Prime Minister won’t last long past May’s local elections and that America’s real special relationship is “probably Israel,” not the United Kingdom. That’s known as a “Washington Gaffe” – when you mess up by saying the truth out loud. Somebody has already dubbed Turner the “Liz Truss of international relations,” which is pretty mean.
There’s little doubt that for Donald and First Lady Melania, the state visit of “Their Majesties” provided the pomp they crave – gun salutes, flags, smiles, impossibly slow walks, and a photo-op at that weird new White House beehive. The soft-focus power of Instagram reels.
It’s an inverted imperialism, though. Away from the cameras, in the drab government offices of Virginia, where nobody cares about enduring bonds of friendship, the functionaries of the American empire are busy asserting the harder realities of power.
Behind the lavish scenes, the Trump administration is using America’s 250th birthday to send an unmistakable message: in matters of real power, Washington rules. Starmer and his European friends must get in line – or else. At a Pentagon briefing last Friday, a senior official vented his spleen at Britain over the Iran crisis and scorned the Prime Minister’s legalistic pettifogging on urgent questions of war.
The Department of War, I understand, quite deliberately floated the idea that America might join Team Argentina over the Falklands as a warning to Britain: all our “special privileges” are now in question, including US military protection for UK sovereign territories and Britain’s seat at the Five Eyes table. “Get in the game,” the official said. “The hour is late.” Exactly what that means – beyond “send some ships” – remains unclear.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is insisting that ‘the value of Nato’ will be re-examined when the Iran war is over. What’s clear, increasingly, is that America and Israel are replacing the clapped-out western alliance. Britain and Europe can either help open the Strait of Hormuz or get stuffed. Maybe that’s why Bibi Netanyahu talks about Israel being ‘the sixth eye’.
Part of London’s problem is that in almost all centers of influence – from Moscow to Tel Aviv to London and DC – the on dit is that Britain has been ruined. On Wednesday, near the Supreme Court, I had a long chat with Steve Bannon, who told me: “The only way the UK gets out of this is civil war.” Later that day, I stopped at Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown to see a friend. He introduced me to Laila Cunningham, the Reform UK candidate, who was in town drumming up strategy for her bid to be London mayor. She too discussed Britain’s decline, though in a less pessimistic way. At one point, I think she took her stockings off – or possibly put them on – under the table almost without us noticing. Surely that’s the sort of dexterity a struggling Britain needs.
I was one of the select few British journalists in America this week who did not attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I’d gone to New York instead. At 8.34 p.m., as shots fired at the Hilton hotel in Washington, I sat in a packed restaurant in Chinatown eating chicken and shrimp. A large screen had the basketball on. At some point one of the staff switched to CNN but left the channel on mute. “BREAKING: TRUMP RUSHED OFF STAGE AFTER GUNFIRE AT WHCD.”
Nobody cared much. At the large next-door table, a group of short-skirted girls carried on talking and taking pictures of their food. For them, the near assassination of the President was about as exciting as the sport: cool if you’re into that sort of thing, I guess.
What excites people now is searching for online clues that the shooting may have been staged in order to advance some Trumpist sinister agenda.
The most popular theory is that it was an ingenious ruse to make sure Trump’s drone-proof White House ballroom got its funding. “I mean, I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” a nice woman called Suzanne told me the following night. “But I totally believe they would do that.”
America is upstream, as they say, when it comes to technology. Concerns about privacy and data have been largely brushed aside. In Washington and New York, people use chatbots far more than we do. On my last day in sunny DC, I found myself on a bench in Foggy Bottom, near the Watergate Hotel. Next to me, a man in shorts and foam trainers was talking to his AI girlfriend on video loudspeaker. The birds (real, I think) tweeted gaily around us. He smiled sweetly at his phone, lost in adulation. “She” spoke back to him in a deeply enhanced “vocal fry.” She flattered him and laughed at his jokes. Love is love, etc. But we’re just not ready for the next American revolution.
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