The “excellent James Macintyre” (to quote Telegraph religion editor George Pitcher) is away on holidays, so may I step forward and offer a defence of my colleague? James has been annoying the Tory leadership for months now with his various scoops – on the Boris/Cameron row over Crossrail; on Jewish leaders’ reactions to Cameron’s alliance with Polish MEP – and former member of the neo-Nazi National Revival of Poland party – Michal Kaminski; and on Obama’s private view of David Cameron – but it is the latter revelations that seemed to have really touched a nerve inside Conservative Central Office. Various anonymous diarists have tried to discredit James’s story on Obama and Cameron in last week’s magazine and, today, Irwin Stelzer, the neoconservative American economist piles in on James in, of all places, the Guardian:
“With Labour’s poll numbers headed south, and its policy cupboard bare, its fans have decided that the personal is, indeed, the political. So what better than to argue that David Cameron is regarded as all sizzle and no substance by the most popular political figure on the world stage, Barack Obama. The US president, we are told in the New Statesman, regards Gordon Brown as a man of “substance”, but David Cameron as all “sizzle”.
Leave aside the Cameron team’s assertion that they have checked with White House sources and hear only denials. They would say that, wouldn’t they? Ask instead whether it is reasonable to assume that super-cautious Obama, a lawyer without an impetuous bone in his body, is likely to have derided a man with whom he might have to do business for years to come. The answer is that Obama is as likely to have shared that thought with Cameron’s political opponents as Thomas More was to have told Richard Rich of his opposition to Henry VIII’s divorce.”
Three points are worth making here, in response:
1) Who said Obama shared his thoughts with Cameron’s “political opponents”? James simply reported that it is an open secret at one of Britain’s leading newspapers that a member of the Obama camp relayed, in confidence, to a senior editorial staffer, the President’s instinctive reaction to meeting Messrs Blair, Brown and Cameron back to back. Blair: sizzle and substance. Brown: substance. Cameron: sizzle. Government insiders on both sides of the Atlantic indiscreetly share such “secrets” with senior journalists all the time. Stelzer, as a man of great knowledge, intelligence, and learning, should know that, shouldn’t he?
2) Tory apologists claim that an American leader would never be so foolish as to criticise, upset or annoy a British ally, future or otherwise. But they forget their own (recent) history. Republican President George W. Bush is alleged to have been so annoyed by fellow conservative Michael Howard’s belated oppostion to the Iraq war that he was barred from visiting the White House. And, of course, as James pointed out in his original piece, Prime Minister John Major famously infuriated presidential candidate Bill Clinton when Central Office staffers became involved in George Bush Snr’s re-election campaign back in 1992. Again, a man of Stelzer’s transatlantic knowledge and experience, should know all this, shouldn’t he?
3) Stelzer, like the diarists, focuses on only one part of James’s story, conveniently ignoring what I would argue is the more substantive element: that members of the Obama foreign policy team have been circulating British newspaper reports on Cameron’s dodgy alliance with Mical Kaminski and, in the words of one Democratic Party source close to the State Department, and quoted by James, “There are concerns about Cameron among top members of the team.” Why wouldn’t there be? Did Stelzer and other Cameron cheerleaders really think the hard-headed Democratic foreign-policy realists inside the White House and the State Department would simply ignore the Tory leader’s isolationism in Europe and his cuddling up to far-right reactionaries in the name of the (mythical) “special relationship”? That wouldn’t be “change we can believe in”, would it?
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