The special relationship is special to only one side

[oldironside]

"For a poignant vignette of Britain's fabled "special relationship" with the United States, you should know that back in the day, visitors to Tony and Cherie Blair's small private flat above Downing Street would note that they had prominently displayed no fewer than four pictures of themselves with the Clintons. How many do you reckon Bill and Hillary had of themselves with the Blairs? I'd guess the full nought, though perhaps the help would have been charged with sticking a small one up in one of the meeting rooms each time the couple paid a fawning visit in their capacity as Dearest Allies.

Just memories now, alas, but owing to Barack Obama's perceived snubbing of Gordon Brown at one of the 37 summits taking place this week, there has been much talk of "another blow" to the special relationship, as though it were possible to land one on something that doesn't exist. Without wishing to let daylight in on the magic only certain British politicians can see, the special relationship is cobblers. It is the kind of imagined relationship that a stalker has with the distant target of their affections, whose oblivious "snubs" are taken weirdly, terribly personally.

I need hardly tell you which role is taken by Blighty. We're Partridgean mentalists, plastering our house with photos of our crush, and have been ever since Churchill coined the "special relationship" phrase, knowing even as he did so that he was being done over by the Americans on lend-lease. Three years ago a senior State Department adviser stated that the special relationship was a "myth". "It has been, from the very beginning, very one-sided," Kendall Myers explained starkly. "There never really has been a special relationship – or at least not one we've noticed."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/25/us-uk-special-relationship