Back in the 1980s, the relationship between the British prime minister and the American president was so intimate that it became the stuff of parody. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan appeared together on coffee mugs and satirical television shows. A popular poster in university bedrooms even featured them as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. As Reagan leaned over Thatcher, a nuclear bomb exploded in the background: “He promised her the end of the world,” read the slogan at the bottom, “and she agreed to take him there.”
Fast-forward 20 years, and it is no longer possible to imagine the leaders of the Anglo-American world in a similar parody. What kind of poster would feature David Cameron and Barack Obama? They, too, have nothing in common, personally or politically. Cameron does not play basketball. Obama does not wear shorts from the Boden catalogue. They don’t even care about one another enough to have a serious argument. Cameron’s recent visit to America passed almost entirely below the radar: outside of Washington, I don’t think the country noticed it at all.
