Martin Kettle is right: Britain has clung too long to illusion and lazy imitation of the US (The shocking US election result will create a new world order – and launch a fresh wave of Trump wannabes, 6 November). Every dark cloud has a silver lining, and the upside of Donald Trump’s election is possibly that British politicians will at last learn not to use the pathetic phraseology of the “special relationship”. Trump already knows what our prime minister and foreign secretary really think of him, and we already know that Trump would prefer to deal with the likes of Nigel Farage.
The dumping of this special relationship nonsense is well overdue, and should have happened as long ago as 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower directed the British government to stop its military adventures around Suez, and to go home at once and behave. Ironically, since then, the special relationship has more often been used by the US to drag Britain into unwise military actions, rather than to put a stop to them.
