If only Rishi Sunak had teamed up with another US president. Things might even have started to look special

Biden is an old-school Democrat, while Sunak is a British Conservative of a newer stamp. How on Earth can anyone expect these two to ever get on, asks Mary Dejevsky

Past pairings worked, or failed to work, more because of character and worldview than anything else (PA Wire)

As a British prime minister who is in many ways more attuned to the United States than any of his recent predecessors, Rishi Sunak should be God’s gift to the much-hyped “special relationship”.

He has worked in the US, he owns a beachfront apartment in California, he has a Stanford MBA, and he has, or had, a green card, which entitles its holder to live and work in America. His evident enthusiasm for the country also makes him that rare creature: a Brit who not only understands and appreciates the United States and what makes it tick, but can hack it on the other side of the Atlantic. His affinity with America is plain for all to see. His first official visit to Washington this week should have been a triumph.

Alas, he is walking away with a vague and underwhelming “Atlantic declaration” on green technology, but no sign of a shiny new trade deal. Indeed, that seems further away than ever. The president can’t even remember his job title.

There are three reasons why Sunak isn’t the hit in the White House that he should be. The first is that his political opponents have made hay with Sunak’s links to the US – especially, and ignorantly, the green card (which they misrepresented as an alternative passport) – to imply disloyalty to the UK, and to insinuate that he had a ready-made springboard to a transatlantic future should his political career in the UK not work out. For the sake of parochial British politics, he now cannot afford to appear too “American”.

Secondly, there’s the limited time he is likely to be in office – his US interlocutors will be as much aware of this as are his allies and enemies back home.

But the third and most important reason is that he has simply been highly unlucky with “his” US president. You can imagine Sunak finding an immediate common language with a JFK or an Obama, and (slightly less so) with his fellow MBA, George W Bush. But Joe Biden? The age gap, and therefore the difference in life experience, is almost 40 years. The disparity in manner, political priorities, and – insofar as can be judged from appearances – character, is huge.

It is not just that Biden is an old-school Democrat while Sunak is a British Conservative of a newer stamp. Or that Biden is a wily and practised political operator, able to fend off the recent threat of a US debt default by “reaching across the aisle”, while Sunak’s political skills seem, to put it gently, less well developed. It is that Biden is an east-coast patrician of Irish origins, while Sunak cleaves more to west-coast innovation – and, in the UK, to a new, more diverse generation of Britons.

Nor does Biden seem to have made any great effort to prioritise relations, let alone to engage with Sunak in the nearly eight months for which he has been prime minister. The relationship got off to a poor start, when Biden mangled his name by pronouncing it “Rashid Sanook”, suggesting a confusion of cultures. Things hardly improved when Biden chose to spend just a day in Northern Ireland in April before heading off for three days in the Republic. They took a sharp turn for the worse after Biden vouchsafed, at a Democratic Party fundraising event on his return, that the only reason he had gone to Northern Ireland was “to make sure the Brits didn’t screw around”.

In between, Sunak and Biden have encountered each other at international gatherings – of the G20 in Bali in November, the new Aukus defence grouping in San Diego in March, and most recently, the G7 in Hiroshima – but there has been little to suggest a rekindling of any “special relationship”. A little more warmth could be observed between the Sunaks and the US first lady, Jill Biden, who attended the coronation last month and followed up by partaking in a No 10 street party, but it is hard to describe UK-US relations at present as anything like “special”. (That said, Jill Biden and Akshata Murty also attended an hour-long Soul Cycle spinning class together after the coronation.)

Will that change now? Much is being made of the fact that Sunak is staying at the presidential guesthouse, Blair House, just across from the White House. Prime ministers tend to stay at the splendid Lutyens-designed British embassy. But the chief talking point, on the UK side, has been a plan for a London summit on the international regulation of artificial intelligence – a poor substitute for the once much-touted free trade agreement.

With the US already in the foothills of the 2024 presidential election campaign, no guarantee of Biden winning a second term, and hints of more caution in Washington than in London on Ukraine policy, any longer-term diplomatic investment could be ill advised on both sides of the Atlantic. And yet, in the event of the US electing a new, probably younger president, and Sunak remaining at No 10 after an election – both admittedly remote prospects as seen from now – there could be the basis for much-improved relations, if not an actual return to the vintage “special relationship” of yesteryear.

Add in his relative youth, the energy with which he bounds down plane steps, his direct, smiling manner, and his avoidance of the euphemisms and codes peculiar to British English, and Sunak is a natural for dealing with the United States and its political leaders. It might also be noted that people with an Indian background constitute the highest-earning ethnic group in the United States. In short, Sunak could have been the very man to set the seal on a new sort of “special relationship”, as the UK looks to reshape its diplomacy in the aftermath of Brexit.

After all, past pairings of US presidents and British prime ministers worked – or failed to work – more because of the commonalities or otherwise in their character and worldview than because of anything else. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did not start out as soulmates, but developed a mutual trust in the high-stakes conditions of what we now know was the late Cold War. George HW Bush and John Major were greyer individuals, but probably safer hands to navigate the risks of the collapse of communism across Europe, which culminated in the dissolution of the USSR.

The Clintons and the Blairs – both bright young leading couples seen as agents of modernity and change – can be judged to have left a mostly benign imprint on the world, but the dynamic became toxic after 9/11, when Blair, emboldened by the semi-success of the intervention in former Yugoslavia, signed up to the younger Bush’s mission to remake the Middle East. Enter Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, earnest policy wonks, called upon to minimise the effects of the 2008 financial crash. They too got on.

Thereafter, relations languished. David Cameron, a man of the shires, never seemed comfortable in the States, or at ease with Obama. The less said about Theresa May’s rush to court Donald Trump at the White House, the better. As for Trump and Boris Johnson, one merciful effect of the pandemic was that it kept them largely apart. Liz Truss came and went without her desired trade deal coming anywhere near fruition.

And now, Biden and Sunak: generationally, philosophically, and in their demeanour at almost opposite ends of the spectrum, and with basic respect, from the US side at least, not always in evidence. If only Rishi Sunak could have teamed up with another US president, how different transatlantic relations might be looking now. They might even have started to look special.