We Don't Care About the British Election--but Some Pointers Anyway

The British election has finally hit the US. It was front page news in yesterday's New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Robert Thomson, the Journal's editor, used to run the Times of London, and the Journal's owner, Rupert Murdoch, prides himself on, usually, picking the British prime minister--but even at the Journal the election has been, so far, a modest story.

Generally speaking, the election of the world leader who will have the closest relationship to the US president and be our most vital and strategic ally (we might not be in Iraq if Tony Blair hadn't so enthusiastically supported George Bush) is of no interest to the American media, or, for that matter, to Americans.

This is partly because we still think of Tony Blair as the prime minister (and he is often on American television rather pretending he is still prime minister), and yet, confusingly, he isn't running, and partly because his stand-in, Gordon Brown, who is actually the prime minister, is a figure of almost incomprehensible dourness and turgidness. Brown's opponent, on the other hand, the Conservative Party leader David Cameron, is very smooth--so frictionless that virtually nobody in the US has ever heard of him. Being quite an anglophile, I was able to get my editors at Vanity Fair to let me profile Cameron, largely, I believe, because they thought it was James Cameron. (I rather liked Cameron, an intelligent, moderate consensus-builder. Comparing our leading conservative, Sarah Palin, to theirs suggests another reason why we are not interested in British politics--we live on different planets.)Continue reading on newser.com