Blair seen as 'Bush's fag' and 'a tool'

Belfast Telegraph

En France: Why Americans no longer respect Blair

Britain's 'special relationship' with the United States has never been a relationship of equals. American Administrations tend to acknowledge its existence only when there is a British Prime Minister in town, and then mainly out of politeness.

But what was once a conceit founded on a presumed bond between, in Churchill's phrase, "the English speaking peoples", is now a millstone around the neck of British foreign policy.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office from which, however monstrously, Palmerston once decided the fate of nations, is these days a mere annex of the US Department of State. Downing Street has at the same time become a branch office of the White House.

Since the recent double indignity of the St Petersburg exchange, which confirmed President George W Bush as an ill-informed Frat Boy and Tony Blair as his fag, the world has learned exactly how the relationship works.

The President whistles ("Yo! Blair") and the PM jumps. How high he should jump seems to be the only subject up for discussion.

Seen from France, the whole thing is contemptible. President Jacques Chirac has not had a good second term. Everything he has touched, from race relations, to employment policy, to his much-ridiculed Museum of Tribal Art, has turned to dross.

But, at least when the President of the Republic speaks, one can be reasonably certain that he speaks for France, and nobody else.

Chirac would no more kowtow to Washington than he would bow the knee to Blair. The same is true of every French politician you can think of, from Nicolas Sarkozy, to Segolene Royal, to Jean-Marie Le Pen. Even Jack Lang, the one-time Minister of Culture, with his fluent English and love of Hollywood movies, is French first, European second and an internationalist after that.

A few years ago, when Chirac, backed by almost the entire National Assembly, refused to fall into line over Iraq, the Bush White House made a serious attempt to excommunicate France from world diplomacy.

I spoke to the French Embassy in Washington at the time and was impressed by the dignity and stolidity of its response. No amount of US sabre-rattling and denunciation of the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" was going to deter the Elysee, the Quai d'Orsay and the French body politic from maintaining outright opposition to the invasion and occupation.

So who looks foolish now? If Chirac did nothing else right in the last five years (and arguably he did not), at least he got that right.

Blair, by contrast, looks weak and foolish. Worse, he risks becoming an international laughing stock.

How does George W see Tony? He sees him as a pliable tool and handy footstool - and, incidentally, a source of personally-selected jumpers for the cold months that lie ahead.

Chirac would have none of that. He'd rather die. French foreign policy may not move mountains any longer, but you only have to look at Chirac's stand on Lebanon to see who has come up smelling of roses and who stinks like a dung hill. Chirac is no friend of Hezbollah, any more than he is anti-semitic or opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.

But he was quick to denounce the Israeli military response to Hezbollah attacks as disproportionate and one of the first to call for a ceasefire and UN intervention.

What did Tony Blair do? He wavered. He vacillated. Read more