LIVE 24-SEVEN
DIGBY LORD JONES THOUGHTS FOR AUGUST
“Graceless bullying: The Art of the Deal” - We all remember that moment in Love Actually when Hugh Grant, as the UK Prime Minister, tells the US President ‘where to go’. In the cinema where Pat and I watched it, everyone cheered.
Real life is, of course, not quite like that, but then again, there have been times in the past few weeks when I have wondered whether we are in the middle of some plot of fiction such is the unreality of a fair few events. Let’s start with Germany being kicked out of the World Cup early doors; there is a God after all!
I am sure that when our Prime Minister stood alongside President Trump for the obligatory press conference at Chequers, tens of millions of people (and that’s only in Britain) were just aching for the ‘Love Actually’ moment.
But it quite rightly never came, as an act of rudeness embarrassing one’s guest, and thus stooping to the lower level inhabited by the guest, is not the way to behave…although it would have made for great TV!
Nor is being gratuitously offensive the way to behave. The right to protest peacefully is one of the cornerstone liberties of any functioning democracy, but to fly over Westminster a big balloon of the democratically-elected President of our largest trading partner, our biggest inward investor and the guarantor of our security dressed in a nappy is unnecessarily offensive. Just how would we like it if a big balloon of the Queen dressed in a nappy was flown over Washington DC during her visit to America?
Mind you, there was more than the whiff of rank hypocrisy in the air during the President’s visit. Thousands of women demonstrated against Trump to protest against his misogynistic behaviour and racist views and quite right too, except...I didn’t see them all out there in similar numbers when the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia recently visited...and there’s a country that treats it women disgracefully and flogs, amputates limbs from and beheads people in public!
The real dismayed frustration of all this is that mixed up in all the bombast, in the apparently ignorant, offensive, inconsistent rhetoric POTUS is making some valid points.
At the NATO Summit in Brussels he was absolutely right to call out Germany for failing in paying its way to defend itself and for letting the USA pay for and provide its defence against the very country to which it has wilfully become vulnerable through its oil and gas deal (nice work if you can get it Herr Schroeder: as Chancellor of Germany, sign up for monopolistic Russian oil and gas supply, leave office and go onto the Board of Gasprom, the
...er...Russian oil and gas supplier!) and which benefits the most from the imbalance in US/EU automotive import tariffs. But making a rude, offensive bull in the china shop look like Noddy in Toyland is no way to make friends with those upon whose help you might, just might, need to call one day. To go from “I’m taking my bat and ball home” to “I love you guys” in 24 hours stretches credibility and stimulates behind-your-back laughter; not good for the apparently most powerful man on the planet.
Mind you, the EU still has an ace up its sleeve. Is it wrong that Germany and others don’t pay two percent of GDP towards NATO? Of course it is, especially when Germany is such a rich nation (it doesn’t need to rearm, it just needs to write the cheque), but whilst Trump left Brussels crowing that they’d all agreed to pay up, it has been agreed such assurances were subject to Parliamentary approval in each country...and so in the end nothing will happen. They’re laughing at you Donald! The EU Member States have turned into an art form committing to things that they have no intention of delivering on; the French call it the EU way, the UK calls it cheating.
A US/UK trade deal will be more difficult if harmonisation between US manufactured or agricultural products and those complying with EU regulations has to be sought, the bully is right, but to sit down with the Prime Minister in public knowing that The Sun newspaper is
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