Seems that Brown’s attempts to get a “proper” meeting with Obama before the Labour Party conference next week have failed. Methinks Obama’s team didn’t want him to be able to capitalise on that, so they had a quick chat in the kitchen

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8272061.stm

Nick Robinson's thoughts are worth a read too.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson ... _card.html

Any influence we have with the USA has gone. The bugger here now is that Brown will bend over backwards to accommodate them in the hope to get back in the “good books”.

Well the fat kid should take his soldiers out of Afghanistan in hope of retaining some popularity with the other fat kids at home. The popular black kid still needs friends there.

There's a Henry Kissinger quote that I always thought was pertinent; it goes something like
'America has no allies, only interests.'

Living as I did though most of the cold war, The Falklands campaign, the troubles in Northern Ireland etc etc it really did always strike me that we believed in the 'special relationship' much more than they did.

Jon

Well we had to, we only had one of these "special" relationships. Unfortunately for us, the yanks have been serial philanderers, flaunting equally special relationships with Israel, Germany, Kuwait, the Philippines, Mexico, and every other slut out there. These relationships typically resemble the one, common (I am told) in prisons, where the most love you can expect on the receiving end is a reacharound in the form of being able to tell the press that you have some influence in Washington.

+1

While we might regard it as the Special Relationship, the Americans probably regard Israel as the special one, and we are just another lapdog. Especially the way Tony acted with George. He made sycophancy an art.