By admin 
Can a Labor Prime Minister get along well with a Republican American President? Or a conservative prime minister with a democrat in the White House?
The short answer is yes, absolutely.
There are plenty of examples of a good relationship and close bond between a Labor Prime Minister and a Republican President. And vice versa.
Some prime ministers and presidents of seemingly opposing political parties have allied themselves for the simplest or most trivial reasons. Cigars, toothpaste and hamburgers, for example.
And things are not always rosy between prime ministers and chairmen of the two sister parties. There have been some major arguments: over Suez, Vietnam and the Caribbean island of Grenada.
But never before has a British Labor prime minister faced such special challenges in maintaining the ‘special relationship’ with a Republican president Lord Keir Starmer does it now.
It is not just policy differences – on issues such as trade tariffs, Ukraine, Israel, defense spending, Brexit and climate change – that currently divide Downing Street and the White House.
Never before has a new president faced such a tirade of brutal insults from leading members of a British government as those hurled at him by leading members of Sir Keir’s cabinet.
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He is a “racist KKK and neo-Nazi sympathizer”, (David Lammy2017), an “odious, sad little man”, (Wes Streeting, 2017) and “a racist misogynistic, self-appointed payer”, (Ed Miliband, 2018). And that’s just one example.
That’s not all. Last month, the Republican Party filed a legal complaint after nearly a hundred Labor Party staffers flew to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris, alleging “blatant foreign interference” in the presidential election.
Critics, led by the new Tory leader Kemi Badenochhave accused Sir Keir and his party of playing student politics by feuding with the most powerful man in the world. And someone who is notoriously vindictive.
Eighty years ago it was all very different (critics would also say that political leaders were real statesmen then).
The phrase “special relationship”, describing the alliance between Britain and the US, was first used by Winston Churchill in a speech in Missouri in 1946, in which he also coined the phrase “the Iron Curtain”.
That speech was introduced by President Harry Truman, a Democrat, with whom Churchill had attended the Potsdam Conference in 1945 to negotiate the terms for the end of World War II.
They were good friends and wrote each other handwritten letters and addressed each other as Harry and Winston. Truman was also the only American president to visit Churchill at Chartwell, his childhood home.
Churchill also had a close relationship with another Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their close bond during World War II was described as a friendship that saved the world.
One of the reasons they got along so well was that they were both known cigar smokers. Like Churchill, Roosevelt’s cigar smoking was a much-discussed part of his public persona after he became president.
But after Churchill’s quarrels with Democratic presidents, his conservative successor Anthony Eden had a serious falling out with Republican President Dwight Eisenhower over the Suez crisis in the mid-1950s.
And it was a conservative prime minister and a Democratic president with seemingly nothing in common, the stuffy and timid Harold Macmillan and the charismatic John F Kennedy, who repaired the damage.
“They had salvaged the special relationship between them after the outbreak of the Suez crisis, and had done so at a time of uniquely high tensions around the world,” wrote British author Christopher Sandford in Harold And Jack, The Remarkable Friendship Of Prime Secretary Macmillan And President Kennedy.
It was the early sixties and they were dangerous times, just like today of course. At the time it was the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear weapons.
“Through it all, the two leaders had exchanged not only formal messages but also a steady stream of handwritten notes, Christmas and birthday cards, congratulations and sometimes condolences,” Sandford wrote.
But it was a relationship that was abruptly ended in 1963, by the demise of ‘super Mac’ brought about by the John Profumo sex scandal and then the assassination of JFK in Dallas just a month later.
“Like many of those who came into the Kennedys’ inner circle,” wrote the Washington Post, “Macmillan was enchanted by Jacqueline Kennedy, and it seems she entered into a happy father-daughter relationship with him that lasted long after the assassination of her husband lasted. “
After Kennedy, the so-called “special relationship” cooled again during the terms of Labor leader Harold Wilson and Democrat Lyndon Johnson, when Wilson rejected Johnson’s pressure to send British troops to Vietnam.
And although Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were ideological soulmates, Thatcher was furious when she was not consulted before the Americans invaded Grenada in 1983 to overthrow a Marxist regime.
Worse still, according to Thatcher allies, Reagan had remained neutral during the Falklands War a year earlier. Reagan said he couldn’t understand why two U.S. allies were fighting over “that little icy piece of land down there.”
Long before the accusations of Starmer’s Labor interference in the Trump-Harris elections, the Tories were accused of dirty tricks in the 1992 Bill Clinton-George HW Bush presidential election.
During the campaign, the Home Office checked immigration nationality records to see whether Clinton had applied for British citizenship while a student at Oxford University to avoid conscription for Vietnam. It wasn’t true.
Then Prime Minister John Major publicly apologized and Clinton was forgiving. In 1994, the “special relationship” got a major boost when the president took Major to the Pittsburgh home where his grandfather and father lived and worked.
Then it was back to Washington, where Major became the first foreign leader to stay overnight in the Clinton White House. But beyond the flattery, the pair worked closely together in the early stages of the peace process in Northern Ireland.
Clinton’s political soulmate was, of course, Tony Blair. They were as close as Reagan and Thatcher. But it was with Republican George HW Bush that Labor’s Blair embarked on the defining mission of his premiership: the war in Iraq.
George ‘Dubya’ Bush had defeated Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election and in early 2001 he hosted Blair at Camp David. It would prove to be a historic meeting.
“He’s a pretty charming guy,” the president said at their news conference. “He has imposed a charm offensive on me.” How many times have we heard that said about Tony Blair?
Then it became very personal. They were asked if they had found anything in common in their conversations. “Well, we both use Colgate toothpaste,” the president replied.
Flashing, an embarrassed Mr Blair interjected: “They’ll wonder how you know that, George.”
The war was the turning point of Blair’s decade in Number 10. He was branded a liar for claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, he was vilified by the Labor left and it was the beginning of the end for him.
A few years later, the Tory prime minister sometimes referred to the “Blair heir” David Cameron, who was close to Democratic President Barack Obama, as he served a barbecue lunch to military families in the Downing Street garden.
They seemed unlikely allies: Obama the first African-American president and Cameron the 19th old Etonian prime minister. It was claimed that they had a “transatlantic bromance” in office.
The two leaders were often pictured together playing ping pong or golf, eating hamburgers or watching a basketball game. “Yeah, he calls me bro sometimes,” Cameron once said of President Obama.
Cameron even convinced Obama to help the Remain campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum, when he claimed Britain would be “at the back of the queue” on trade deals with the US if it left the EU.
Which brings us, neatly, to Sir Keir and newly elected President Trump and the Prime Minister’s hopes for building a special relationship.
On the plus side, the president loves Britain: his mother was Scottish and he owns two golf courses in Scotland. And Sir Keir tells us that the Trump Tower dinner in September went well. The articulate Mr Lammy admitted he was even offered a second helping of chicken. “He was very friendly,” he claimed.
On the other hand, neither the Prime Minister nor the President smoke cigars, as Churchill and Roosevelt did. We’re also not sure what toothpaste they use, unlike Bush and Blair.
And while the president clearly loves hamburgers – he threw them in a McDonald’s during the election campaign – and steak, well done, with ketchup, Sir Keir is vegetarian, although he does eat fish.
But if even an oldie like Harold Macmillan can get along with the flamboyant JFK and the glamorous Jackie Onassis, there is hope for Sir Keir and that much-vaunted ‘special relationship’.
(c) Sky News 2024: Can a Labor Prime Minister get along well with a Republican President?