One can only imagine the scene in the White House briefing room this week, or rather, one can imagine it all too vividly because it has become the signature choreography of the age: President Donald J. Trump, hair defying both gravity and good taste, gesturing with the expansive certainty of a man who has never met a metaphor he couldn’t mangle, announcing to the world that Sir Keir Starmer is no Winston Churchill. This, mind you, because the British Prime Minister had the temerity to hesitate before letting American bombers use UK bases to pound Iran in the latest instalment of what history will no doubt call the Perpetual Middle Eastern Misunderstanding. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump added, for those slow on the uptake, as though the ghost of the old bulldog might materialise in a cloud of cigar smoke and brandy fumes to apologise for Starmer’s shocking lack of spine.
The remark is vintage Trump: part insult, part historical fan-fiction, and wholly revealing of the peculiar American love affair with Winston Churchill that has been running, uninterrupted and unexamined, since roughly 1940. It is an obsession so complete, so sentimental, and so detached from the actual country of Britain that one half expects the next Republican convention to open with a choir of red-hatted patriots belting out “Land of Hope and Glory” while waving little plastic V-signs. Churchill, to the American imagination, is not merely a politician; he is the Platonic ideal of the British Prime Minister, the default setting to which every subsequent occupant of 10 Downing Street is supposed to revert like a malfunctioning satnav. Cigar? Check. Brandy? Check. Ability to stare down tyranny while cracking wise in a plummy accent? Double check. Anything less and the poor fellow is immediately diagnosed with terminal feebleness.
One wonders, in the driest possible tone, what the real Winston Churchill would have made of being turned into this transatlantic mascot. The man himself was half-American, of course, which perhaps explains the enduring romance; blood will out, even when diluted by several generations of English boarding schools. But the Churchill Americans adore is not the complicated, brandy-soaked, empire-clinging, Gallipoli-fumbling, Bengal-famine-adjacent Churchill known to actual historians. No, theirs is the Hollywood version: Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, growling defiance from the bunker while the violins swell and the audience reaches for its Kleenex. He is John Wayne in a three-piece suit, saving civilisation single-handed because that is what Americans expect their British allies to do—preferably without asking awkward questions about logistics, public opinion, or the small matter of a sovereign parliament.
Starmer, poor sod, never stood a chance. Here is a man who looks like he was assembled from the spare parts of a particularly cautious solicitor and a mid-level NHS administrator. He speaks in the measured tones of someone who has read the risk assessment twice and still isn’t convinced. He refused, initially at least, to turn Diego Garcia and other British real estate into an American forward operating base for the latest round of desert fireworks. One can almost hear the collective American intake of breath: Not Churchill. As though Churchill would have leapt from his grave, lit a Romeo y Julieta the size of a baseball bat, and personally piloted a B-52 over Tehran while muttering something devastating about the Ayatollah’s mother. The fact that the actual Churchill spent much of 1940 begging Franklin Roosevelt for help—and promising, in effect, that Britain would become America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier—seems never to intrude on the fantasy. History, like so many other inconvenient things, is what you make it on cable news.
The deeper comedy, of course, is that Britain itself has been quietly trying to retire Churchill for decades. To the average Briton he remains a national treasure, certainly, but one kept in a glass case marked “Do Not Touch—Fragile Imperial Ego Inside.” We wheel him out for tourists, for VE Day anniversaries, and for those moments when we need to remind ourselves we once mattered. But we do not expect our prime ministers to channel him any more than we expect them to wear top hats and ride to hounds. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not in the business of re-fighting the Battle of Britain; it is in the business of not bankrupting the NHS and trying to pretend that net zero is compatible with keeping the lights on. When Trump demands Churchillian defiance, what he is really demanding is that Britain should once again subordinate its interests to America’s without complaint, all while wearing a funny hat and saying 'jolly good, bravo' at appropriate intervals. It is less a foreign policy than a costume drama.
And herein lies the exquisite sardonic twist. Trump, the man who once kept a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office like a religious relic, has now discovered that the British have committed the ultimate betrayal: they have failed to remain frozen in 1940 for his convenience. The special relationship, that most elastic of diplomatic fictions, is revealed once again to be special in the way a one-sided marriage is special—endlessly flattering to the larger partner, endlessly exasperating to the smaller. Starmer’s cautious multilateralism is not weakness; it is the weary realism of a middle-ranking power that has seen too many wars sold as moral crusades and ended as expensive regrets. But realism has never played well in Washington, where foreign policy is conducted as a cross between a Marvel movie and a real-estate negotiation. If the British will not supply the heroic soundtrack, then clearly they are letting the side down.
One pictures Churchill himself, somewhere in the afterlife cigar lounge, raising a glass with that trademark mixture of amusement and contempt. He knew better than most how fickle great-power friendships could be. He knew that empires rise and fall, that alliances are temporary, and that the Americans—charming, generous, and utterly convinced of their own destiny—would eventually tire of the old country’s diminishing returns. He might even have sympathised with Starmer’s predicament: the need to balance domestic politics, parliamentary arithmetic, and the small matter of not being dragged into someone else’s war on a Tuesday afternoon. But sympathy, like irony, is wasted on those who prefer their history in primary colours.
So here we are, with President Trump wielding Churchill like a club and the British Prime Minister politely declining to play the role of plucky understudy. Another American president has discovered that Britain is not a theme park. Another British prime minister has been informed he is not the second coming of the man who saved Western civilisation. And the special relationship, like so many other cherished illusions, staggers on, slightly more ridiculous than before. No Winston Churchill? Quite right. There was only one, and he had the good sense to die in 1965 before he could be reduced to a rhetorical prop in a White House briefing.
The rest of us—Americans, Britons, and anyone else foolish enough to watch the news—must muddle through with the politicians we actually have. They may lack the rhetoric, the cigars, and the V-signs, but at least they are alive. In an age of perpetual crisis, that is perhaps the most heroic quality left.