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She’s met Assad and Mugabe – but will Donald Trump be the Queen’s worst house guest?

There could be one moment of light relief: Philip giving the president a tour of the Sandringham estate at the wheel of a turbo-charged open-top 4x4

Matthew Norman
Tuesday 23 April 2019 17:31 BST
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President shocks onlookers as he defies royal protocol twice during Queen meeting

Two days after turning 93, the Queen has our sympathies along with belated birthday felicitations.

No one dwells much on the old girl’s feelings about ordeals like the state visit scheduled for June. But it can’t be fun for a woman of any age, let alone one seven years shy of having to send herself a telegram, to anticipate Donald Trump overnighting at one or more of her modest residences.

In 67 years as sovereign, she has hosted house guests beyond counting, and never less than graciously even during rooftop riots. Yet, with the exception of a few serial killers (and even then…), it’s hard to think of any less savoury than Trump.

The visit might not happen. The 45th Prez is believed to be slightly brittle on the ego-massaging front. The threat of spectacularly vast demonstrations, replete with hundreds of baby blimps, may deter him. So might John Bercow, who has the absolute monarch’s powers over the Palace of Westminster, and isn’t scared to use them. If the speaker stuck by his threat to block Trump from making a speech to both houses, that could do it.

But assuming the grotesque’s grotesque does pitch up, Her Britannic Maj will take the shame. After entertaining Bashar al-Assad, Robert Mugabe, Muhammad Suharto and others of that endearing ilk, she is as trained by experience as she’s suited by temperament to handling a strongman.

Whether her country wants this puke-rousing visit, or can expect to benefit from it with a quick and generous post-Brexit US trade deal, is not her province. In situations like this she is a tiara-clad trick-turner, pimped out by her government to sit up ramrod straight at the banqueting table and think of England (and the other three bits of her realm) while pleasuring the client with her rigid smile.

Her loyal subjects are free to express their revulsion, however, and not only towards the guest. Thrice as nauseating as Trump will be the lavish words of welcome from Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and other Trump ingratiators/impersonators.

Their idea of “getting our country back” is doubling down on the wannabe 51st-state subservience that’s shaped British foreign policy since 1945 – and more than ever since Tony Blair fashioned those crippling Camp David jeans into a gorgeous metaphor for handing the US our wizened gonads during his one-way trip up Dubya’s fundament.

According to The Lancet, the only thing that worried Bush’s doctors when later he had a colonoscopy was that it found no trace of Blair.

If Boris et al were serious about “reclaiming our sovereignty”, they’d fret more about the nuclear delivery system that can’t be deployed without Washington’s consent than any imaginary laws dictating cucumber shapes from Brussels.

This state visit could be a blessing in the heaviest of disguises. If it passes with the silken sycophancy Downing Street demands, it will underline what Boris would call our “vassalage” to the strutting bully (the country as well as its terracotta figurehead) across the ocean.

All the genuflecting to the orangutan-in-chief should ignite an inferno of repulsion; focus the listless; diffuse political campaigns for the second referendum, which by the latest polling (58-42 for Remain) would reverse the result of the first; and more clearly signpost the two divergent paths ahead.

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One leads to staying within an EU that shows some signs of developing the will to mould itself into a liberal democratic counterbalance to the imperial dominion of the United States and the nascent superpower ambitions of China.

The other is a transatlantic highway to becoming an American client kingdom – a giant US geostrategic outpost grovelling for a trade deal which will (whatever rot Trump spouts to the contrary) take untold years to negotiate, and be settled almost wholly on the US’s terms.

If the optics of a Trump state visit have the potential to illuminate this decisive fork in the road, bring it on. By provoking protests in unprecedented numbers by a righteous coalition of the glorious young climate change activists, Final Say enthusiasts and general anti-Trumpers, it could be the catalyst for the self-cleansing this increasingly septic isle needs.

On that optimistic basis, John Bercow should let the doolally grifter address parliament, though only after excavating some 17th-century precedent to deny him an autocue. Veering off message into deranged flights of fancy, he’d offer an educative glimpse into what it would mean to be entirely at the mercy of American democracy.

As for the Queen, my mother would rebuke me for failing to mention that she is faultless. But after nine decades of iron self-discipline, it wouldn’t half be nice if she released her coiled rage about being pimped out to monsters, or at least some dormant sense of mischief.

I’m not demanding the world. As monarch, you or I would obviously insist on Philip giving Trump a tour of the Sandringham estate at the wheel of a turbo-charged open-top 4x4.

If that’s the sort of diplomatic etiquette lapse she understandably prefers to avoid, fair enough. But is it too much to ask her to orchestrate a minor sheet-music cock-up, so that the regimental band announces him not with the “Star Spangled Banner” or “Hail to the Chief”, but Green Day’s “American Idiot”?

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