Dating the President

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If you hate speed-dating, don’t run for the US presidency.

Imagine the scene: Bleary-eyed, you step into the Oval Office gnawing a half-eaten bagel left over from last night’s reception for the American League for the Cultivation of the Purple-Bearded Giraffe.

Your in-tray contains a security briefing about 27 different CIA reports of certified Elvis-sightings and a memo from the Surgeon General about a hallucinogenic strain of elderberry which has entered Minnesota’s food chain.

At this moment of crisis, just when you need to summon those powers of reason and clarity you spoke about on the campaign trail, your chief of staff pirouettes in to announce the imminent arrival of a Scotsman who claims to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

You frown: “The UK – you mean, England?”

The chief of staff nods.

“Man, I was just reading about them. Didn’t they set fire to this very building at fourteen minutes past six?”

The chief of staff shakes his head.

“No, Mr President that was in 1814.”
“Oh right, before the invention of colour television.”
“Yes, but they do have nuclear missiles.”
“Loose nukes?!” You put down your bagel. “Did they get the warheads from the Russians?”
“No, we sold them. The Brits are on our side now, and you’d better get ready for Mr Brown.”

An aide arrives with an urgently needed cup of coffee which you gulp.

“Their PM has the same name as the dude from Reservoir Dogs? Cool.”

A frantic scene then ensues with the president cramming up on facts about the British Prime Minister.

But an even more intense session will have taken place aboard the aircraft shuttling Mr Brown across the Atlantic. He knows he is one of a multitude of world leaders, state governors, beauty queens, and celebrity turkey groomers who will enter the White House before lunch.

It’s easy to picture the PM in Bermuda shorts and clutching a surfboard as he seeks to make an instant impact on the Hawaiian-born president. But it’s not so likely that Barack Obama would take the trouble to don a kilt to put Mr Brown at ease, although he could arrange for a secret service agent to toss a caber in the Rose Garden.

But as in love, political partnerships can be fused in the moment when leaders recognise one another as the soul mates they have longed for since their first childhood game of Risk.

In the friendship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Captain Kirk of Cold War capitalism found his British Spock.

Did such magic crackle in the Brown & Barack handshake? It’s too early to say, but when the US president asks his valet for a nightcap tonight, perhaps he will say: “Make it a Scotch.”