Here Comes The Junior Partner

Britons — disinclined to trust their politicians farther than they can throw them — are beginning to realize that their new Prime Minister is a man of his word. David Cameron’s austerity program is every bit as beastly as he promised. Before May’s general election, Cameron warned the voters of “economic pain” in the shape of swift and eye-watering cuts to Britain’s public expenditure. He made good on that pledge a mere 42 days after taking office, proposing to cut spending by £30 billion ($45.5 billion) a year, freeze public-sector pay, hack back the welfare bill and increase value-added tax on all but essential goods and services. As controversy roils and amid threats of strikes by public-sector workers, who would blame Cameron if he extended his forthcoming two-day jaunt to the U.S. by a week, perhaps two?

(Watch TIME’s interview with David Cameron.)

In a conversation with TIME just before his trip, Cameron professed a “very strong attachment to America” and said he is looking forward to visiting Washington and New York City. That’s hardly surprising. Abroad often represents a pleasant haven for politicians tired of domestic struggles, and the U.S. has proved especially benign to British Prime Ministers. Margaret Thatcher always found a warm welcome at Ronald Reagan’s White House. Tony Blair was feted in Washington as his popularity curdled at home. Even Gordon Brown found audiences in the U.S. ready to applaud his role in saving the global banking system. Cameron hasn’t yet made his mark on the world stage but at least knows that when he calls on President Obama and others, a wide expanse of ocean will separate him from his critics back home.

(See pictures of David Cameron.)

Unfortunately for him, there’s that other stretch of water, off the southern coast of the U.S. The explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico triggered a crisis that risked polluting U.S.-U.K. relations as severely as it did the Gulf. Cameron had the tricky task of being expected to defend BP while striving to establish good working relations with the Obama Administration. “You’ve got the press sort of barraging you to start lobbing grenades into the White House, but that’s not actually the way you get things done,” he says. “I made the case that I thought that quiet diplomacy was better for us than grenades. And funnily enough, I was backed in that by what BP themselves wanted.” BP, he says, wants “to clear up the mess, stop the spill, pay compensation. But what’s important at the end of all of this is [that BP] is still a stable and strong company.”

The BP spill means that Cameron’s first official U.S. visit could never have been simply a jolly. That apart, there are a host of big issues he’s tabled to hash out: economic recovery, Afghanistan and security and intelligence cooperation. British and American interests are inextricably intertwined. The discussions awaiting Cameron across the Atlantic will be quite as decisive in shaping his premiership as the debates he leads in Britain. And because successive U.S. administrations have come to depend on Britain to uncomplainingly support America’s global objectives, the outcome could matter almost as much for the U.S. as for its smaller ally.

(See video: “New For Britain: Televised Debates.”)

The Junior Partner
If you doubt that assessment, consider Cameron’s predecessor-but-one. Blair’s instinctive backing for U.S. policy after Sept. 11, 2001, not only undermined his own premiership but possibly didn’t help the U.S. much either. Blair believed he should offer unconditional support to America rather than negotiate hard for national interests. As he told Britain’s official inquiry into the Iraq war in January, “This is an alliance that we have with the United States of America. It is not a contract. It is not ‘We do this for you, you do this for us.'” Blair added, “As I always say to people, you can distance yourself from America if you want to, but you will find it is a long way back.”

Britain’s current Prime Minister is by no means alone in thinking it might have been better for both Britain and the U.S. if Blair had distanced himself enough to offer robust constructive criticism to President George W. Bush. Before he came to power, Cameron told TIME, “Blair [to America] was too much the new friend telling you everything you want to hear rather than the best friend telling you what you need to hear.” British leaders, Cameron says, need to understand that they have limited sway in Washington. “We should always be conscious of the fact that we’re the junior partner in this relationship and America is a Pacific power as well as an Atlantic power. I think that we should deal with things as they are rather than trying to be too needy.”

(Read: “David Cameron: A Question of Character.”)

So pronounced is Cameron’s determination to recalibrate relations with the U.S. that some Atlanticists have feared the dawn of a new ice age. Obama has evinced none of the sentimental affection for Britain displayed by many of his recent predecessors, and Cameron and many of his closest associates have little of the romantic attachment to the U.S. that was so much a part of the political makeup of Thatcher, Blair and Brown. But the new Prime Minister has no intention of needlessly distancing himself from Washington. “I think it is a special relationship,” says Cameron of the alliance. “I think it’s an essential relationship for us.”

It may help that Cameron, 43, seems temperamentally disposed to get on well with Obama. (The body language between the two of them at the recent G-20 summit was notably relaxed.) Both men are seriously clever and, one suspects, don’t mind who knows it. Both are controlled, data-driven and pragmatic. Cameron praises Obama’s “calm appreciation of the big picture” and says the President is “a very easy man to get on with. He has enormous command of the subject, handles the G-8, G-20 meetings I think brilliantly in terms of trying to get people to focus on what matters … He has a great grip and a great grasp, and it’s impressive to see.”

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Their ideological differences — one leads a right-of-center party, the other a left-of-center one — are unlikely to prove divisive. “There is no permanent affinity between Tories and Republicans, Labour and Democrats,” Christopher Meyer, who served as Her Majesty’s ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003, writes in an e-mail. “The temperature of the relationship is defined by the issues of the moment.”

Oil on Troubled Waters
Some of those issues are bound to be fraught. There is BP, of course, and also an independent inquiry ordered by Cameron into allegations that British intelligence personnel were complicit in the torture of detainees held by other security services, including the CIA. But perhaps above all, there is economics. Britain is the largest world economy to have started unwinding its stimulus package and commenced fiscal tightening, but there is unease in Washington that such policies may so dampen demand that they will increase the dangers of a double-dip recession. Cameron says there isn’t a choice between tackling budget deficits and going for growth. “You need to do both,” he says. “For Britain, the moral of the story is very clear — that deficit reduction is part of ensuring good global growth.”

(See pictures of David Cameron.)

The cuts, it will be noted in Washington, include defense. For years the U.S. has been able to depend on Britain — on a scale unmatched by any other ally — to help it shoulder the global security burden. As part of a wider examination of Britain’s global role, Cameron makes no secret of his aspiration to extract the 10,000 British troops currently stationed in Afghanistan by 2015. Britain, he says, “needs a realism about who we are, what we can achieve and what we need to do.” That means “less grand diplomatic talk” and an injection of “a sort of gritty, commercial, businesslike realism to British foreign policy.” Cameron’s distaste for ideology-driven military adventuring seems almost visceral. He says he’s a “liberal Conservative” in foreign policy terms, and the phrase is telling. “A liberal because I support the spread of democracy, freedom, human rights around the world … but Conservative because I’m skeptical and questioning and practical about how possible it is to remake the world.”

Journey to Power
The first of Cameron’s three recent conversations with TIME was conducted in the back of a Jaguar being powered along narrow Cornwall country lanes at breakneck speed. Cameron appears little changed by power, which may be because he never really seemed to question that he’d be there one day, on the cream leather seat of a prime-ministerial limo. He was born to affluence and educated in the kinds of elite institutions (Eton, Oxford) that endow students with the expectation of success, and it took him only four years from entering Parliament, in 2001, to snatching the leadership of his party. He’s got “mind-blowing confidence,” a family friend told TIME. “He doesn’t do doubt.”

(See the Top 10 moments from the U.K. General Election.)

This charmed existence was brutally interrupted in 2009 by the death of Cameron’s 6-year-old son Ivan. The child had cerebral palsy and epilepsy and required 24-hour care. (Cameron and his wife Samantha have two other children, and she is expecting another.) Ivan’s difficult life placed Cameron in an unfamiliar position of helplessness. It also gave him an intimate appreciation of Britain’s state-funded health system, one of only two programs Cameron has pledged to protect from cuts (the other is foreign aid).

Cameron briefly lost his mojo during the election campaign as it dawned on him that his party might not win an outright majority over all the other parties in the House of Commons. Yet since the Conservatives cobbled together a coalition with Britain’s Liberal Democrats, he has relished every day in office “doing rather than saying.” He also gives every appearance of relishing his partnership with the Lib Dems and with Nick Clegg, their leader, now Deputy Prime Minister.

(Read: “Can a Referendum on Britain’s Voting System Kill the Coalition?”)

If the idea of Conservatives and Lib Dems working harmoniously still boggles the minds of the British voters who brought the parties together, it seems even more surreal in the U.S., where liberal mutates into a term of abuse in the mouth of a Conservative and conservative routinely summons up night terrors for liberals.

Even in Britain, strategists in both parties worry about what will happen when the partners find they cannot agree on a core issue. But inside Westminster’s famous chattering classes, there is a growing conviction that love is blossoming in Britain’s marriage of political convenience. Usefully for Cameron, the Lib Dems are sharing the flak for the swingeing cuts. But there’s more to it than that. With every passing week, it becomes clearer that coalition government is allowing Cameron to edge his party away from its old habits of social conservatism toward some of the metropolitan attitudes he holds himself. He recently told the online news service Pink News that “commitment through marriage was equally valid whether between a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and a woman,” though, tellingly, he is quite happy to sate his right wing by allying with European parties who hold old-fashioned views on homosexuality. Cameron is above all a pragmatist, not an ideologue.

(Read: “Nasty No More? Britain’s Tories Reach Out to Gays.”)

He is, however, leading an experiment that may yet bring a sea change in British politics as profound as any ideologically driven transformation. Liberal conservatism might prove to be an oxymoron; Britain’s flirtation with consensus politics may quickly founder. But it hasn’t foundered so far, and in just a few hectic weeks the coalition has already done some serious business: the budget, setting up the torture inquiry, issuing an apology for the killing by British paratroopers of 13 unarmed demonstrators on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland 38 years ago, proposing a radical restructuring of the national health system. That is why Americans could do worse than study the British delegation soon to arrive on their shores — and not only for clues on the direction of U.S.-U.K. relations. They might learn that when confronted with the manifold challenges that face the developed economies, a polarized politics isn’t the only way forward.
— With reporting by Nick Assinder / London

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