Hunt and Pompeo’s awkward tryst exposes the widening cracks in the UK-US ‘special’ relationship

Every now and again a relatively small event comes along that nonetheless serves to illustrate something much bigger. This week’s visit to London by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo – the standard prelude to any state visit – was a classic of the genre.

When was the last time that a UK prime minister or foreign secretary looked entirely comfortable in the presence of his or her US opposite number, even on their home territory? Jeremy Hunt has been foreign secretary for nearly a year now, but you might take a moment to look at the picture on the Foreign Office website of his joint press conference with Pompeo. If this was the best our diplomatic PR people could do, imagine what the other stills must have been like.

On the right is Pompeo looking gruff, confident and slightly down his nose, even though Hunt is marginally taller. Hunt, meanwhile, looks uncertain, a bit apprehensive and a bit keen to please. The press conference itself was an agonising exercise in inequivalence and inequality. I don’t recall watching anything more like teenager and grown-up since David Miliband stood alongside secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

It is true that Theresa May looked a little more at ease than Hunt did, when she had Pompeo settled in an appropriately commodious chair beside the Downing Street fireplace. But that may be because a) she has the (slight) advantage of rank, and b) she knows she will be out of office before long one way or another and is actually past caring about anything other than “delivering Brexit”.

But her early encounters with Donald Trump hardly suggested confidence in her position as chief representative of a senior US ally. The over-eager invitation for a state visit – that was not hers, protocol-wise, to extend – was the highlight of her first visit to meet Trump after his inauguration. That state visit is only now coming to pass, two and a half years on and two years after President Macron hosted Trump at Bastille Day.

But May was by no means the first recent UK prime minister to look somewhat diminished alongside the self-styled leader of the free world. David Cameron, for all his Etonian polish, never seemed at ease alongside Barack Obama, still less when Obama took him to a basketball game in Ohio and they tried informality. For all the common cause they may have found over Iraq, Tony Blair always seemed unsure of himself alongside George W Bush.

You probably have to go back to that new-generation foursome of the Blairs and the Clintons who took each other to metropolitan restaurants and wonked policy into the early hours for the last time that UK and US leaders were altogether at ease in each other’s company. And before that, of course, the Maggie and Ronnie love-in as the Cold War wound down.

As foreign secretary, Willliam Hague tried to redress the imbalance a little by introducing a glamour-prop in the form of Angelina Jolie and a worthy (and fashionable) cause in the form of seeking to end rape as a weapon of war. Hunt has taken a leaf out of Hague’s book by harnessing the international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney to his equally worthy – and, yes, I’m afraid, also fashionable – cause of global media freedom.

The difficulty for both foreign secretaries was that their chosen causes, while enjoying a high profile internationally, were well beyond either their – or the UK’s – power to remedy. The 2014 Hague-Jolie summit on the subject was criticised a year on for being an expensive failure. Hunt’s media freedom summit in July risks going the same way – with some added awkwardness in the small matter of double standards.

It is possible, for instance, that Julian Assange – who divides media and almost every other branch of opinion down the middle – will still be in a UK prison not a million miles from where the summit will be held – unless, of course, he is granted early release, or extradited to the United States, which would raise other issues. The Assange case, incidentally, is one on which Clooney, despite her appointment as the Foreign Office special envoy on media freedom, has maintained a deafening silence. In contrast, the case of the Reuters journalists, imprisoned and just pardoned in Myanmar, is simple. What’s the betting that they will be star attractions at the London summit, especially as Clooney acted for them and Hunt claimed a part in petitioning the Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. All the elements are lined up in a nice tidy row.

Not everything is so clear-cut, however. It was a well-judged, very Foreign Office, touch to invite Pompeo to what was called a religious freedom round-table with faith leaders during his London visit. But it seemed a bit rich for the foreign secretary at their joint press conference then to claim some credit for the safe departure from Pakistan of the persecuted Christian Asia Bibi, given that the UK had apparently done its utmost to avoid granting her asylum for fear of a backlash among Pakistanis here. Just listen to this: “Britain’s primary concern has always been the safety of Asia Bibi and her family; we have been in contact with our partners to help ensure that she gets the freedom and security she deserves.” But she is not here; she is in Canada.

Any perception of double standards on what are officially lauded as our “values” is, of course, something for the UK alone to address – though Clooney’s silence on Assange and our cowardice over Asia Bibi hardly testify to great courage in our own convictions. Still more conspicuous during Pompeo’s visit, however, were the cracks on two major foreign policy issues.

On Iran, the UK disagrees with the US decision to withdraw from the hard-won multilateral agreement designed to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Like the EU, and indeed Russia, the government sees the US move as an invitation to Iran to renounce the agreement, too – as indeed it is now threatening.

Then there is China. The issue here is not – or not primarily – Donald Trump’s efforts to extract fairer trade conditions, as he sees it, with China. It is rather the extent to which the UK already relies on the Chinese conglomerate, Huawei, for elements of its telecoms infrastructure and the decision – already taken, apparently – to involve Huawei in the UK’s development of 5G. The US regards any Chinese company as linked to the Chinese (communist) state and a potential threat to western security. The point may come where the UK will have to choose between Huawei’s 5G and its prized intelligence-sharing relationship known as “Five Eyes” (with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

Rarely has the weakness of the UK’s current diplomatic position been laid as bare as it was this week in what was said, half-said and left unsaid in official accounts of the Pompeo meetings. If the UK were not on the point of casting off from the European Union, if there were a different president or the prospect of one in the White House, if the UK had not burnt its boats with Russia long since, then we might have more leeway. As it is, the UK is stranded between a bloc it has rejected, but whose priorities it upholds, and an ally from which it is increasingly estranged. This is not, to put it mildly, a congenial place to be.