More Bulldog Than Poodle, Gordon Brown Offers a New “Special Relationship”

By Jonathan Freedland, Comment Is Free. Posted August 1, 2007.

He should go to Washington more often. Gordon Brown may have been dreading his encounter with George Bush, knowing that every appearance Tony Blair made alongside the American president cost him votes by the crateload, but Monday's joint press conference at Camp David actually did Brown a favour. There was Bush, alternating between two of his least appealing personas: either frat-boy, mocking Nick Robinson's baldness, or cowboy, vowing his determination to track down the "cold-blooded killers" who do "evil". By turns he was condescending, telling Brown he had "proved his worthiness as a leader" during June's thwarted terror attacks, and rambling, eventually admitting that he was going on "too long". Next to Bush, Brown had only to read his script to look like a master communicator.

That's not all that went well. Brown wanted his Washington debut to look nothing like the Bush-Blair love-ins of the past, and he succeeded. Out went the groin-squeezingly tight jeans, in came the suits. No more "George", now it was Mr President. No more hugs between Laura and Cherie; this time the wives stayed at home. The backslaps were gone too, replaced by a shake of the hand. Every sign spelled out the same message: strictly business.

To the naked eye it may have seemed as if these superficial matters of body language and costume were all that had changed. But a close reading of Brown's words at Camp David, and indeed the content of his entire trip to the US, including his appearance at the United Nations yesterday, suggest otherwise. They indicate a shift not only in the so-called special relationship, but a deeper, strategic rethink in what Brown pointedly does not call "the war on terror".

That much was visible in the wide cracks of daylight the prime minister opened up between himself and the president. Yes, there were multiple avowals of shared purpose and common values. But while the president said the west confronted "an ideology of darkness", Brown declared that "terrorism is not a cause; it is a crime". That immediately denies the terrorist the dignity of an enemy and casts him instead as a mere criminal, to be hunted down chiefly by policework and intelligence. Noticeable too was Brown's desire to be specific: the conflict was not with "terror" - an abstract noun - but "al-Qaida-inspired terrorism".

The differences were even clearer on Iraq. Bush still speaks with righteous zeal for the mission, but Brown offered only the flat statement that Britain had "duties to discharge and responsibilities to keep." It was left to Bush to say that "Gordon Brown understands that failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the security of our countries", but the prime minister said nothing to confirm that statement of his views. Bush still refers to Iraq as the "central front" in the war on terror, but Brown named Afghanistan as the "frontline".

Above all, Brown put the US on notice for an eventual withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, dependent on the word of military commanders on the ground. Since that is the same formulation Bush himself uses, he could hardly object.

It's not quite Hugh Grant sticking it to Billy Bob Thornton in Love Actually, but this is about as far as a British prime minister could reasonably be expected to go in putting an American president at arms length. No, he didn't call Bush a deranged Texan gunslinger but nor did he return a single one of Bush's copious personal compliments. While the president tried to warm the air with talk of the "humorous Scotsman", Brown said their talks had been "full and frank" - icy diplomatese for a row. If breaking the clammy hug Blair and Bush shared was the goal, it certainly worked. A headline in yesterday's Washington Post declared of Brown: "More bulldog than poodle."

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