Does who the President is really matter to Britain?

By Simon Gentry

The old joke “How do hedgehogs make love?”, “Carefully”, sprang to mind today as we watched government ministers strain every sinew not to answer questions about the elections in the United States. ‘Careful’ has been the watchword.  The fact is, however, that they are as desperate to know the outcome as we all are.  At a time when the UK is carving a new, independent foreign policy for itself for the first time in decades, who runs America is important.  The Prime Minister was asked about it in Prime Ministers Questions in the Commons today and the Foreign Secretary by Andrew Neil this morning:  Both chose the diplomatic route and declined to answer the questions.

We in the UK tend to obsess slightly over the state of the so called ‘Special Relationship’ between the UK and the US.  It may have been really special 70 years ago in the wake of the Second World War, but (Spoiler alert) American Presidents say this to every country they visit.  That’s not to downplay the relationship.

There are immense links that bind the two countries together and that’s not going to change whoever ends up in the Oval Office in January.  And that’s the real point.  America’s attitude towards Britain is only fractionally influenced by the character of the President.  What Presidents care about is whether we are helpful or unhelpful as they try to achieve their foreign policy objectives.

The American foreign policy community was broadly opposed to the idea of Brexit because they saw the UK as a useful and generally amenable tool as they tried to influence the EU.  But, as we have seen over Russia and China in recent months, a UK outside the EU has been ale to move faster and more boldly than the EU has and is taking positions and saying things that many in Washington want said.  The UK does not seem to have paid much heed to what Donald Trump would have thought about our position on the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexander Navalny.

The US and the UK are currently negotiating a free trade agreement at the moment and that is important to both sides. We may be new to negotiating trade deals, but the US is in a constant state of negotiation with countries all over the world.  They will have clear negotiating objectives, just as we do.  Whether or not the person at the top liked The Crown or Downton Abbey is irrelevant.  Their objectives will have been arrived at, as our were, after consultations and negotiations across multiple industries and companies over years.

And so, as we wait for the final result of the election to come clear, which foreign leader gets to speak to the President first, who he tells he has a special relationship with, or when he plans to visit will be seized upon by the British media and mused upon by the commentariat but it will be irrelevant the political, security, commercial and cultural ties that bind are wider and deeper than between any other two countries.  Whether the President likes us or is ambivalent is not important.