Falling into conversation with a London-based American banking chief executive in the chaotic aftermath of the financial crisis, I was asked about the vagaries of the British establishment. “It is very difficult to understand where power really lies; there are all these networks and signals that hardly any of us are clear on,” he said. I agreed, it was indeed a tricky matter. Six months later, that chief executive had quit, returning with relief to a country where a spade is actually called a spade.
Britain and America, George Bernard Shaw said, are “two countries divided by a common language.” The divide is becoming clearer. Not just between the U.S. and the U.K., but between the U.S. and the whole of Europe.
