President Biden faces an uphill task in smoothing out wrinkles in his relationship with Britain, experts say, as infighting continues to plague the ruling Conservative Party and the country’s traditionally impartial bureaucracy appears to influence affairs .
“Joe Biden has been the most anti-British American president of the modern era,” Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told Fox News Digital. “He has treated the British people, the United Kingdom, with enormous contempt, from the collapse of a US-UK trade deal to his refusal to attend the coronation of King Charles.”
Biden arrived in Britain on Sunday night ahead of a critical NATO summit this week, with the bloc seeking to cement details and commitments for a new support package for Ukraine and the establishment of a NATO-Ukraine council.
President Joe Biden waves as he descends the steps of Air Force One at Stansted Airport in Stansted, England, Sunday, July 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
The visit is the first time Biden has visited since King Charles III took the throne, as Biden did not attend the May 6 coronation. Biden made sure to call Charles before the event to congratulate him, and the king invited him to a state. visit after the coronation, but many Britons still interpreted the move as a snub.
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Some believe that Biden has no special fondness for the United Kingdom, a position that stems from his strong connection to his Irish roots and the difficulties that have persisted between the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain.
President Biden listens to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a news conference at the White House on June 8, 2023. (AP/Susan Walsh)
This age-old friction is just one speed bump among many, according to Gardiner, who also cited Biden’s “intense anti-Brexit … very pro-EU” stance and discomfort around the administration’s interference in the nominations of the Secretary General of NATO to oppose the British choice. by Ben Wallace, currently UK Secretary of State for Defence. Wallace was seen as the front-runner for the position, but failure to secure US support ended his hopes, The Telegraph reported.
“This has caused a lot of unhappiness in London,” Gardiner noted. “This has happened right before his visit to the UK and this has generated a lot of bad publicity, I think, for Joe Biden ahead of his trip.”
Prince Charles reads the Queen’s Speech during the State Opening of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster on May 10, 2022 in London. (Getty Images)
“And if you add to that the reality that Biden and his administration are basically backing Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union Commission, to be the next head of NATO, that’s considered very insulting, of course, to the British.” added.
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Alan Mendoza, co-founder and executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital that despite these tensions, Biden’s visit has an opportunity to “consolidate the growing relationship between the two leaders.”
British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace is pictured in London on April 25, 2023. (Jordan Pettitt/PA via AP)
“We should not expect any major announcements to emerge given the substantive discussions that have already taken place over the past month, but the volume of talks in recent months, and the addition of a meeting with the King this time around, underlines the awareness that both countries would. good to work more closely,” Mendoza said. “The UK-US alliance remains critical to the future of the free world.”
Biden arrives amid a difficult situation in the United Kingdom, which may limit the impact and value of his trip, as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces a mini-revolt of sorts in his party and a lack of support: He got negative approval ratings among his party for the first time since taking office in October, with -2.7% after a respectable 11.7% last month.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks as World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab listens during a WEF session in Davos, Switzerland, on January 17, 2023. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
His approval rating in the traditional Conservative stronghold region of the “Blue Wall” in southern England fell to -8%, according to a Telegraph report.
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Sunak’s approval rating has suffered in part from the continuing drama surrounding Boris Johnson’s exit not only from the role of prime minister last year, but also from his role as a member of Parliament. Johnson and several other longtime party members resigned their seats, with some suggesting they were ousted from within.
An anti-Conservative Party protester holds a sign near the Houses of Parliament in London on December 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
“I would say that there are deep internal divisions within the British Conservative Party and a lot of unhappiness in the ranks of the Conservative Party with the current leadership, which they see as a shift of the Conservative Party to the left,” Gardiner said.
“Also in the background you have the efforts of the Civil Service to undermine key aspects of government policy,” he added, citing the government’s inability to tighten immigration law to deal with the “small boat crisis”. that the Civil claimed. The service has objected and worked to “turn it around”.
Former Prime Ministers Liz Truss and Boris Johnson attend the Remembrance Sunday ceremony in London on November 13, 2022, honoring service members who have fallen in the line of duty since the First World War. (Toby Melville/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
“So certainly in the U.K. I would say it’s not easy for the British government to push strong, strong Tory policies because there’s a public service that’s very opposed to a lot of the government’s agenda.”
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The civil service has come under intense scrutiny after Sue Gray, the official tasked with leading the independent inquiry into Boris Johnson and his ‘partygate’ COVID-19 scandal, accepted a role as the Labor leader’s chief of staff opposition Keir Starmer: Subject to the approval of the Corporate Appointments Advisory Committee. Starmer led the left-wing Labor party.
Johnson wrote in a statement after Gray’s report was released that he was “being forced out by a small handful of people, with no evidence to support their claims, and without the approval of even party members conservative and even less of the general electorate”.
“There have long been suspicions that officials of a different political vision have been able to stall this government’s efforts to enact their preferred legislative agenda by throwing up procedural roadblocks along the way,” Mendoza said.
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“The furore over a senior civil servant like Sue Gray negotiating a job offer with the Labor Party while still a serving civil servant is just the latest example of a sense that the traditional neutrality of the civil service may have been eroded.” , he said. “The net effect has been to see an Americanization of our system with an increase in political appointees as special advisers to ministers, helping them shepherd ideas through the swamp of Whitehall.”
Biden plans to meet with King Charles III and Sunak on Monday before leaving for Vilnius, Lithuania, for the NATO summit on Tuesday.
Peter Aitken is a reporter for Fox News Digital focusing on national and world news.
