The European Dimension

Contemporary journalists and academics with the benefit of hindsight have viewed Anglo-American relations between the eras of Macmillan and Kennedy, and of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, in a negative light. Variously described as ‘the lean years of the almost forgotten friendship’, the ‘weakening’ and ‘muted’ relationship, the alliance ‘depreciated’ and ‘estranged’, this period of what one writer has described as the era of ‘the Labour ascendancy’1 — seemingly implying that the administration of Edward Heath was almost socialist in its approach — is generally regarded as one in which there was no ‘special relationship’ between London and Washington.2