Theresa May should have aligned with the EU and Canada at the G7 – not Trump’s America

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This is a risk a British prime minister has taken before. Theresa May defended a Republican US president who is fanatically unpopular with the British people as she travelled to the G7 summit in Canada.

That was bad enough, but she spoke up for Donald Trump after he had humiliated her by refusing a one-to-one meeting at the G7. Not only that, but he refused because he had had enough of her “school mistress” tone. No 10 naturally told journalists that no such meeting had been asked for, and they weren’t expecting such a thing, but it was plainly a snub.

It was part of a bouquet of dissings handed out by the most childish holder of high office in an advanced modern democracy. Yesterday Trump made clear that he would turn up late and leave early at a summit he regarded as a distraction. Yesterday, he told off Justin Trudeau of Canada and Emmanuel Macron of France for complaining about his trade war, saying they charge the US “massive tariffs and create non-monetary barriers”. He signed off on Twitter: “Look forward to seeing them tomorrow.”

But Theresa May ignored the rebuff and told journalists on the plane to Canada that America had made a positive contribution at international summits on shutting down online terrorist propaganda and in bringing North Korea to the negotiating table.

She sounded so positive about Trump that Jim Pickard of the Financial Times asked her: “Do you think the US president is misunderstood, and do you think he will be remembered as one of the great US presidents of history?”

I’m not saying she didn’t answer the question, but she didn’t answer the question: “When we look at the issues that we’re addressing with America, as a United Kingdom and in other different fora…”

Since the Second World War, this is what British prime ministers have done. May’s humiliation by Trump brings back memories of Gordon Brown chasing Barack Obama through the kitchens of the UN building in New York just so that he could say they had had a face-to-face meeting.

She, like Brown, takes the view that such embarrassments just have to be borne because it is in the national interest for Britain to hug the Americans close. The exceptions are notable for their rarity in the context of an assumed “special” relationship. Harold Wilson refused to send troops to Vietnam – not even one symbolic piper – and Margaret Thatcher told Ronald Reagan off for invading Grenada, a Commonwealth country, without warning.

On the British side, though, the US-UK relationship is where pragmatism and populism collide. For Tony Blair, the relationship was an “article of faith”, but his support for the US invasion of Iraq is the main reason he is so unpopular now. A lot of that is to do with the demerits of the invasion itself, but some of it is to do with the offence to British pride of subordination to American power. And he was never humiliated by George W Bush in the way that Trump is insulting May now.

May is probably right, pragmatically, to want to minimise EU retaliation against Trump’s protectionist tariffs on steel and aluminium. All economic history teaches us that tit-for-tat tariffs are bad for everyone.

But Blair’s unpopularity should be a warning of what happens to prime ministers – eventually – if they stand too close to a US Republican president.