Washington watch

Gordon Brown's praise for Tony Blair's foreign policy in the Sun was about more than Labour's squabbles. It was an attempt to get the American right on side
October 20, 2006
Can Gordon woo Washington?

It was Dan Fried, the man whocovers Europe for the US state department, who quipped during Blair's week of torment: "it looks like we have a second civil war on our hands." The big cheeses on the seventh floor of the state department were circulating the rumour that Dick Cheney was complaining that those semi-commies in the Labour party were finally showing their true colours, and that this tax-and-spend Scotsman who had sabotaged Blair was going to pull the troops out of Iraq and leave the Americans in the lurch.

Cheney does not know much about modern Britain, but one fact he does like to cite is that one British worker in five is a public employee and a third of new jobs created since 1997 are in the public sector. Cheney got this factoid from Washington's acknowledged American expert on Blair's Britain, Irwin Stelzer of the very conservative Hudson Institute. Stelzer is best known in Britain as Rupert Murdoch's ambassador to the Blair government. He certainly wields far more clout in Washington than the Beverly Hills car dealer Bob Tuttle, the current US ambassador in London. Ironically, Stelzer is a personal chum and admirer of Gordon Brown, and as Blair announced his departure, Stelzer began making reassuring phone calls around Washington to the effect that the special relationship would be safe in Brown's hands. As did Brown's other useful American buddy, Alan Greenspan.

This was not enough for Bush, who has already lost his other European allies, José María Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi. Bush is bereft at the thought of losing Blair, and wanted urgent reassurance that Britain was not about to go pacifist. Bush's national security adviser Steve Hadley passed on his master's concerns direct to Downing Street. And Condi Rice took the prospect of Blair's departure so seriously that she dropped what Tumbler's sources described as "a heavy hint" that Gordon would do himself a big favour by making comfortingly pro-American noises.

At the British embassy, concern focused on the ponderous figure of Congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the House of Representatives international relations committee and the bane of the Brits' life as the man who single-handedly screwed up the joint strike fighter deal. Hyde has blocked the transfer of crucial avionics technology on the grounds that Britain cannot be trusted not to sell the stuff to the Chinese, the Russians or even the French. Worse still, Hyde has picked a personal fight with Brown over the chancellor's spiffing wheeze to raise $50bn for foreign aid on the international bond markets, with donors committing future aid budgets to pay off the bonds.

The result of this flurry of US alarm was Brown's article in the Sun on 8th September, which was swiftly faxed around Washington. It said: "In al Qaeda, we face an enemy driven by hatred of our very existence. Between justice and evil, humanity and barbarism, democracy and tyranny, no one can afford to be neutral or disengaged." Just in case that was not enough, Brown wrote of his pride that "our heroic armed forces are leading in the global fight we must wage against terrorism."

If Brown thought that this article, along with his plan to visit the US for the fifth anniversary of 9/11, would insulate him against sniping from the American right, he was wrong. Hyde's staffers have got hold of a copy of God's Politics, a new book by liberal evangelist Jim Wallis, which attacks the Iraq war and hails Brown as a new version of the prophet Micah. The book carries a fulsome blurb from Brown, calling it "powerful reading for anyone interested in social change."

No shoo-in for the Dems

Britain is, of course, neutral in the American mid-term elections, but the champagne will flow at its Massachusetts Avenue embassy if the Democrats take congress and Henry Hyde loses his crucial chairmanship. And even though the polls and pundits are increasingly confident that the Dems will at least take the House of Representatives, there are three facts to remember. The first is that Bush's approval ratings have climbed from the low 30s to above 40 per cent over the summer, mostly coming from traditional Republicans who have got over their anger at Bush now they consider what a Democratic congress could mean. And a new ABC poll finds 55 per cent of Americans saying the country is safer now than it was before the 9/11 attacks. The second is that the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries makes it tough for the Dems to win the 15 seats required to take the house. Right now, they will have to win at least three of the five toss-up races, in Colorado's 7th district, Kentucky's 4th, New Mexico's 1st, Illinois's 6th and Washington's 8th. The third problem is that the Democrats like nothing more than the kind of internal feuding that made Senator Joe Lieberman lose his Democratic primary in August.

Lieberman, by the way, looks like winning re-election as an independent on the current polls, and his conqueror Ned Lamont is sufficiently worried to rake over some very dirty laundry, namely Lieberman's "moral outrage" rebuke of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It has at least won Lamont an endorsement from the first couple. Bill had campaigned for Lieberman, but has now switched to Lamont as the official Democratic candidate, and Hillary has invited Lamont out to the Chappaqua homestead.