To understand how we arrived at this point, we must take a step back, and understand what happened after the 9/ll terrorist attacks. When George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, speculation ran high that his relations with Britain and Tony Blair could not be nearly as close as Blair's with Bill Clinton. After all, both Clinton and Blair were "third way" advocates in their respective domestic political environments, "New Democrat" and "New Labour," close both politically and personally. Indeed, the first Blair-Bush encounters were hardly propitious.

But 9/11 changed all that, largely because of Blair. Bush knew what he wanted to do, which was find and defeat the attackers, and Blair rallied immediately to Bush's side. Blair was with America on Afghanistan, with America on Iraq (with some differences kept largely out of public view, occasioned largely by British political and legal problems) and with America on the larger global war against terrorism. Even as opposition grew over Iraq, Blair never wavered. Nor has he wavered since leaving office, as his recent Chilcot Inquiry testimony demonstrated.

Moreover, Americans understood that Blair's anti-terrorism convictions were emotional as well as intellectual. One US friend of mine who had long lived in Britain told me at the time about encountering Blair outside Saint Paul's Cathedral following a memorial service for the 9/11 victims, just days after the attack. The Queen had asked to meet Americans in London upon leaving the cathedral, and Blair accompanied her. My friend thanked Blair for his strong statements immediately after the attack. Blair responded intensely and directly: "We are going to win this thing. We are going to see this through. We will prevail." Few Americans saw this emotional level of Blair's support so personally, but we all felt it. Accordingly, no one should be surprised that Bush and his supporters responded in like terms.

Blair's Labour Party was not so stalwart, and many UK Conservatives were diffident. Perhaps because the Opposition's duty is to oppose, perhaps because of lingering Tory Arabism, or perhaps for other reasons, many Conservatives simply recoiled from the unmistakable reality of the close Blair-Bush partnership. Indeed, there was a strange confluence between the Labour Left and some Conservatives on the subject of Blair being a "poodle" for Americans in general and Bush in particular. This characterisation was convenient for Labour's anti-Iraq war crowd, and convenient to show both distance and a certain kind of nationalism among Conservatives. 

The "poodle" analysis, however politically attractive, was always foolish, especially for Tories. Blair himself was no poodle, nor was any other British official. In the unlikely event that Blair ever gave an order to "go easy on the Americans", it was unquestionably the least-obeyed command in British diplomatic history, as I can attest from my own personal experience. Conservatives should have seen, and many did, notably the then leader Iain Duncan Smith, that America's war against terror and overthrowing Saddam Hussein were also Britain's fight. Most of the party's rank and file had no trouble understanding this convergence, at least at the outset. Nonetheless, many in the Tory political class, as time went on, choked on Blair's enthusiasm for the fight.