Obama in Britain! (and the rest of the world, grrrr)

Kanishk is in holiday and asked me before he left to report on Barack Obama  in London. It is quite hard to do so. There isn't really a British angle as the trip was played out for US domestic politics. Dropping in on the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition was a politeness. He got the usual cloying questions about a special relationship between the UK and the USA - well, he was not going to deny it. There was a great deal of not so subdued irritation about his decision to make his only European speech in Berlin. I thought it was wonderful positioning and deserved by Merkle. But there is a constant nervousness in Whitehall about "loss of influence". Hostility to the EU's erosion of British sovereignty is widely used to displace attention from a shameless degree of sovereignty subservience to the United States, the poodle mentality that lies beneath the surface of so-called self-assurance. What, then, to do about his choice of No 1 venue in the heart of Europe? To oppose it would be anti-American, to applaud it pro-Europe. Best forget it as quickly as possible. It was amusing to note that the Tory leader David Cameron gave him some British CDs for his ipod, to try and project the way both have, so to speak, inhaled Bob Marley unlike Gordon Brown (while, as we have said before there is no need to worry about what keeps Sarkozy hyper-active). But I hope that Obama and his staff have been sensitive enough to to see beneath the flattery. It is not just that most of the political class here never thought he would be nominated (and in the case of most Labour politicians with the exception of David Lammy supported Clinton). There is a great deal of loathing, prejudice and a fear his advent as president in the UK. Iraq is at the heart of this. Obama's speech against it warned in prescient terms about what would happen after Saddam was overthrown. How do Miliband and Cameron feel about this? They can't look forward to having to eat their words if the word itself changes in Washington.