Bye, bye, Barack......

And so we say farewell to Barack Hussein Obama. 44^th POTUS. A good many British voters might well say ‘And good riddance, too!’

 

His keynote address was cold, condescending and downright insulting. To suggest that Great Britain with a population in excess of 60 million, the centre of the world financial services industry, the world’s fifth largest economy with a current growth-rate twice those of Germany and France and ten times that of Italy, the second largest aero-space industry, and much more, is incapable of thriving outside the stifling embrace of Brussels is not only belittling but downright insulting and ignorant.

 

And, worst of all, to say that outside the EU Great Britain would ’go to the back of the queue’ for trade deals was a threat; ‘do what I tell you to do or face unpleasant consequences’.

 

Boris Johnson weighed in with a typical Bojo defenestration of  Obama’s hijacking of the referendum debate. This was a long piece exclusive to The Sun. His central theme was in response to Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ threat (to be fair, it’s obvious that the speech was cleared and maybe edited in Number 10. The give-away is the word ‘queue’. This is a purely British usage that does not appear in the American lexicon).

 

He might also have added that there is no queue; Obama’s Pacific and European trade deals are stalled and he has not the slightest prospect of getting either through Congress. Neither have his successors. American business in  open competition with low-cost Asians? Turkeys might just vote for Thanksgiving!

 

Boris was immediately attacked for being ’racist’. His crime was to refer to the removal of the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office and reflect on  Obama’s origins. This is the totality of his reference during a long article.

 

‘Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.’

 

That’s all. Anyone who finds this ‘racist’ will find racism around every corner and be in need of remedial treatment..

 

The truth of the matter is that by-and-large the British have never taken to Obama.

 

At least he has secured his place in history. No POTUS has ever been so unpopular in the UK, although there have been close contenders such as Nixon. The ’Churchill bust’ saga was extensively reported in the British media and was generally  interpreted as a snub. Special relationship? That was a Churchillian construct; forget about it. At the time we were led to believe that it had been handed over to the Foreign Office. Now Obama says that he passes it every day in its new position.

 

Perhaps it’s in the Presidential bathroom.