John Lloyd

BRITISH Prime Minister Theresa May’s temptation must have been to counterpunch after receiving Donald Trump’s advice to concentrate her mind on the militant threat to Britain rather than reacting to his retweeting of British far-right anti-Islam videos. “@theresamay, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom,” the US president tweeted to his 40 million-plus followers. “We are doing just fine.” “Two of America’s worst mass shootings (Las Vegas concert/Texas church) have happened on your watch,” she might have tweeted back. “Shouldn’t POTUS focus on gun laws?” She didn’t do that, of course. Her actual response was brusque. “It is wrong for the president to have done this,” she concluded — a comment within the bounds of diplomatic protocol. What one frank friend might say to another. The question which arises from this: is the UK-US friendship, the “special relationship,” special any longer? Probably. Education Secretary Justine Greening told the BBC that while she didn’t agree with Trump’s tweets she “did not believe it should detract from the close relationship the UK has had for many, many years and will go on to have with America and the American people.” In the short term, however, the relationship will tremble. As will Theresa May, for she more than any other Western leader sought a demonstrative friendship with Trump, who held her hand in the White House rose garden. For May, a trade deal with the United States is a necessity after/if Brexit takes the UK out of the European Union’s single market. There is a greater dependence than usual on the UK side of the relationship, one of which Trump — with his self-vaunted expertise in deal making — will be well aware. And the prime minister will have been aware that he is aware. Nonetheless, she still issued a public rebuke — a sign of her disgust, of her realization that the British establishment and most of its population would share her disgust and that she sees some things as too important to remain silent. Yet if Britain is dependent — as all European states are on the US military umbrella, among much else — so is America dependent on Britain. The “special relationship” is more treasured by British politicians than most American ones, but it still matters, especially when Washington seeks allies in controversial projects like the Iraq invasion. For Trump to prioritize the desire to hit back at a British prime minister over the threat of damage to that relationship is to reveal the terrible shallowness of the president’s grasp of international relationships, and to rouse yet again fears that his unpredictability and narcissism threatens us all. If any good came of the latest fine mess the president has got the presidency into, it is that it has, for at least a day, brought the fractured and fractious British politics together behind Prime Minister May. Sadiq Khan, the Labour (and Muslim) mayor of London, himself a target of Trump’s earlier tweets, said that the president’s comments were “a betrayal of the special relationship.” The shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, showed a tender care for Queen Elizabeth not usual for one on the left of the Labour Party, lamenting that Trump had put the monarch into a “difficult and invidious position” since the invitation for a state visit, which still stands, is officially issued under the Queen’s name. Is it possible that Trump’s straight-from-the-shoulder