Adam Boulton Diary – Biden’s in, but the Churchill bust is out

Oh no, not the Churchill bust again. Joe Biden may be moving forward into a New Day for America, but some Brits seem eager to take offence at a non-existent snub to the venerated Special Relationship. They are cringing like slapped lap dogs because Biden’s only gone and done it again and removed the head of Sir Winston from the Oval Office.

New readers can pick up here, if they fancy a generous helping of the baloney which some of who we once called Fleet Street’s Finest are panting to serve up.

The story so far: incoming presidents “redecorate” the Oval Office to make it their own. Mostly this is done by changing the nick-nacks on the shelves and the pictures on the walls.

When Barack Obama moved into the White House in 2009, his team tried to return a bust of Winston Churchill which had been a personal loan to George W Bush from the British Ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer, ever faithful to his instructions to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there.”

The Obama Team thought they were doing the right thing with someone else’s property which had been left behind. After all, the White House already had an identical copy of the bust by Sir Jacob Epstein on display.

British hacks whipped up a stink, especially when they saw that Obama’s “Oval” did have space for effigies of the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Junior and John Lewis. A leading right-wing columnist, with the byline “Boris Johnson”, called it “a snub”, along with some comments about Obama’s Kenyan heritage. Two sometime Republican presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, joined in the attack on Obama over Churchill.

Things got worse with the exchange of gifts. Gordon Brown’s team bust a gut for him to be an early guest of the new President. He turned up in a snowy Washington just days after the inauguration when the new administration was still unpacking crates and trying to locate the restrooms. With exquisite over-sensitivity Brown presented a pen holder made from wood from the sister-ship of HMS Resolute, whose timbers were used to make the so-called Resolute Desk, presented as a gift by Queen Victoria to President Haines.

An American whaler recovered HMS Resolute after it got stuck in the arctic ice and Brown saw this as “a reflection of the nature of the relationship between our two countries”. Obama’s team were horrified when my producer, a historically-inclined American, informed them that this heavily symbolic present was heading their way. They had no protocol officer in place and didn’t even know that an exchange of gifts was normal on such occasions. A junior official was sent to the shops to address the deficit and came back with some DVDs playable only in Zone 1. Snub number two was duly written up by “Fleet Street”.

“Oh, that’s just Fleet Street”, Obama said to me dismissing claims he didn’t like the British. The ever-courteous President tried to patch up Gordon Brown’s visit by placing a Winston bust in his private White House Quarters, which he passed every time he watched TV.

To no one’s surprise Trump made a thing of putting Churchill’s bust back behind him in the Oval Office during his first flush, also remembered for grip and grin meetings with Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

But Churchill does not feature in the new President’s redesign. The labour leader Cezar Chavez has been awarded the prime spot behind the desk. There are images elsewhere of Rosa Parks, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt. These stars of American diversity seem appropriate heroes for only the second Catholic president committed to tackling inequality and racial tensions at home. No slight to Churchill and Britain need be felt.

There is no particular reason why Biden, who describes himself as “Irish” but does not dwell on his family roots in Sussex, should have Churchill as an icon. World War Two nostalgics forget that Churchill was not universally popular back in the old times in either of the old countries.

Perhaps under advisement from Karen Pierce, the admirably sensible British Ambassador, Downing Street has so far been relaxed about Biden’s make-over. The Prime Minister has not reprised his cuttings in spite of the provocative claim from the Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy that Biden is “woke” – on the other side of the culture war.

Nandy is pushing it a bit. Seventy eight-year-old “Sleepy Joe” is no Bernie Sanders. He is, for example, strongly opposed personally to abortion but says the politics should be left to individual choice. On the other hand, Biden’s political heritage is that of a New Deal blue collar Democrat and that puts him more on the wavelength of British Labour than British Toryism. Over his fifty years in politics, he has become well acquainted with our politics and politicians. I doubt Donald Trump has ever heard of Neil Kinnock, let alone being capable, as Biden was in 1988, of borrowing from one of the Labour leader’s best speeches.

Boris Johnson should not expect to be friends with Biden, any more than John Major was with Bill Clinton. And perhaps less thanks to his occasional “Britain Trump” posturing. There will continue to be plenty of areas to cooperate in both the public and private realms – from academia and entertainment to NATO and climate change. And plenty to disagree on as well.

The US looks to the UK to be a reliable and responsible ally on the international stage and, until recently, trusted Britain more than anyone else. But the Special relationship is cultural and linguistic and certainly not a claim to first preference, especially as both nations diversify in different ways from whatever WASP – white Anglo-Saxon protestant – bonds their leaders may have once shared.

It is a special relationship in the sense that it is a complex one drenched in the ambiguities of shared history. But stay cool Boris, don’t get in a bother about a bust.