Adam Boulton: Special relationship? Both UK and US are in it for what they can get out of each other

The so-called “special relationship” between the UK and the US is acted out in the level of cooperation between the two governments and personified in the relationship between the presidents and prime ministers of the day.

Voters have thrown together some odd couples since 1946 when, then ex-prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill coined the phrase into diplomatic usage in a celebrated speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri.

At first glance no special relationship could be stranger than that made up of the newly elected Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Donald J Trump, who looks on course to be re-elected to the White House in November.

Left of centre Labour and populist right-wing Americans make strange bedfellows.

Undaunted, the British side is already flirting with intent. Perhaps the two leaderships may fit together more closely than expected.

In spite of his jibe or joke about the UK becoming the first Islamic state with a nuclear weapon, JD Vance, the newly nominated vice-presidential candidate, may help consummate the relationship rather than hinder it.

Inevitably, and ironically, renewed US-UK intimacy will complicate the other special relationship which the new British government is trying to rekindle with the European Union. That is a matter for discussion elsewhere.

A special or transactional relationship?

Most diplomats chafe at the term “special relationship”. They point out that relations between the US and the UK are always transactional.

Both countries are in it for what they can get out of the other. Sentiment does not buy much in practice.

Beyond shared political roots and the English language, the two countries have often found that their interests are aligned. They continue to be major trading partners and mutual investors.

Presidents have taken an isolationist “America First” stance before Trump and Vance, but, for their own security, they have ended up intervening decisively in two world wars on the same side as the UK.

Subsequently the US, backed by the UK, insisted on taking the lead, founding the new international order such as the United Nations and the European Convention on Human Rights.

British politicians ranging from Boris Johnson to the new foreign secretary David Lammy (but not Nigel Farage MP) are urgently repeating this argument to the Trump team about Ukraine. So far with limited success.

Trump has backed away from his previous expressed admiration for dictators such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China.

If Trump and Vance come to power they will surely expect allies to spend more on their own defence. The UK is already in the US’s good books on this.

Both Trump and Vance are vain, however. In office they will not want to abandon the US’s pre-eminent role in the superstructure of international relations.

The US and the UK have learnt to stay close while not relying on each other too much. In the 1950s they fought together in the Korean War as part of the UN force.

But in the 1960s prime ministers Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson both resisted US invitations to commit British troops to fight communism in South East Asia.

Macmillan took a patronising – we are the Greeks you are the Romans attitude – towards the relationship. His plans for nuclear weapons were rebuffed by John F Kennedy, although the US-made Polaris system remains the UK’s principal deterrent.

Which leaders got on with who? A look back

Political ideology does not count for much in relations between national leaders. On the right the Conservatives are loosely aligned with the Republican Party and on the left Labour and the Liberal Democrats go with the Democratic party.

This makes little difference as to which leader gets on with who.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are often viewed as the model special friendship.

The two of them saw eye-to-eye on economic policy but in 1982 the Reagan Administration came close to backing Argentina during the Falklands War on “America First” ideology.

In the end its support for the UK cemented the two leader’s bonds, although Thatcher repeatedly had to urge Reagan to stand firm in the confrontation which eventually broke the Soviet Union.

She told his successor George Bush senior not to “go wobbly” when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The first Gulf War followed. She was deeply shaken when the new president chose to extend his hand of friendship to Germany first.

Prime minister John Major struggled to have a warm relationship with Bill Clinton, who was aware that Conservative HQ had tried to help the Republicans with dirty tricks during the campaign.

Clinton and Blair became close friends and developed the idea of a “third way”, neither left not right, in politics.

But Blair took Clinton’s advice on Bush junior when he took over – “to hug him close”. Blair later said he found the Republican president easier to deal with than the Democratic Clinton.

After 9/11 Bush and Blair sent their forces together into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fellow charmers David Cameron and Barack Obama got on well. With Cameron’s blessing Obama warned the UK would be “at the back of the queue” for trade deals if it voted Brexit. His intervention backfired even though he has been proved right.

The US valued the UK as “a bridge” across the Atlantic into Europe. Trump was practically the only US politician who backed Brexit.

Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all scrambled to suck up to him and in Johnson and Truss’s cases continue to do so. President Trump eagerly accepted the pomp of an early state visit but gave nothing back in return.

Relations with the Biden administration have been cordial but distant. The 46th president has chosen to emphasize his Irish heritage over his English side.

As he demonstrated on the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, Rishi Sunak displayed little interest in foreign affairs. A significant failing since most former prime ministers say their biggest surprise in Number 10 was how much of their time was taken up by them.

Starmer’s team were exceptionally well prepared to take over power. With the help of Karen Pierce, the UK ambassador to Washington DC, he secured two important contacts.

Just days into office, he was invited for a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office when Biden made the interesting observation that the UK is “the knot” between the US and Europe.

The fact that Starmer was the only foreign leader to get through on the phone to Trump in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt may turn out to be as lastingly significant.

Starmer’s slogan “country first, party second” carries a soft echo of “America First”. Labour got back Red Wall voters and pledged not to go back into the EU or the single market.

The arrival of Vance, with his hard scramble from hillbilly poverty, makes it easier for Trumpers and Starmerites to share a class-based outlook. Trump’s outsider pose has always been undercut by the millions of dollars he has had access to all his life.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy has been cultivating his acquaintance with Vance and greeted his nomination by saying “we share a similar working-class background with addiction issues in our family. We’ve written books on that. We’ve talked about that. And we’re both Christians.”

Starmer is an atheist, but he too celebrates his humble background and has committed to the service of “working people”.

His cabinet boasts that it contains the fewest ever number of privately educated members, with several members, including Lammy and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who grew up in impoverished and dysfunctional circumstances, as did Vance.

Vance, Starmer, Lammy and Rayner also have in common that they are intensely pragmatic politicians who have shifted their political stances markedly to get where they are today.

It won’t be a love match but shared class instincts may bring “Change” Labour and MAGA America closer together. This would not be a glorious special relationship but it might yet contribute significantly to global stability.

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