Most coverage this morning of the Bush-Brown summit at Camp David stresses the extent to which both men were at pains to defuse any perception of a bust-up. But Benedict Brogan (the Daily Mail’s political editor and one of the best bloggers around on UK politics), who has been travelling with the Brown party, has a slightly different take in a series of posts on his site. He reports:
As he races back to the airport in another sirens-blazing motorcade, Mr Brown will be entitled to congratulate himself on the way his first visit to the US went. Much of what he wanted to achieve was presentational: he and his officials sweated the imagery of the Camp David visit, and I hear there were grim faces in the White House contingent when they discovered Mr Brown planned to read a fairly blunt statement at yesterday’s press conference. “It was designed to be uncomfortable, and it had to be done,” one British source told me. Desperate to cling on to British support as Iraq implodes around him, Mr Bush was willing to tolerate just about anything from his guest. He now knows that he will get plain speaking, rigorous formality, and little else. In exchange, he talked up Mr Brown’s personal qualities, and offered that Britain is also America’s “single most important strategic relationship”.
Another subtle shift picked up on by various US foriegn policy Kremlinologists: Bush too said that the US-UK relationship was “our most important bilateral relationship”. As the FT noted, “…the usual formula is to say ‘there is no more important relationship’ than that between the US and Britain – a form of words that can include other partners.”
Practically zero coverage of the Brown visit on the US blogosphere, though.
