From the fixation on immigration to the attacks on a wicked “liberal elite”, Crosbyism belly-flopped into Britain and dominated British politics. But because the runes lay far from Westminster – all the way in Australia – they were missed by our parochial Village, more gripped by the latest Blair-Brown spat.The silence that has greeted Bob Shrum’s arrival seems eerily similar. A third of the Democrats elected to the Senate were steered there by Shrum, and he has worked as a speech-writer and campaign co-ordinator for presidential candidates from George McGovern to John Kerry.He grew up in Los Angeles in a family filled with reverence for Franklin Roosevelt and the American liberal tradition, and went on to script the most memorable lines to fall from American liberals’ mouths for three decades. In agreeing to go to war, we betrayed not just our own principles, we failed America as a friend and as an ally.a.hamilton independent.co.uk

More from Adrian Hamilton. The question obsessing the Westminster village – that tiny horde of people who huddle at the far end of Westminster Bridge and run the country – is: what kind of Prime Minister will Gordon Brown turn out to be? But in the endless babble about who’s up and who’s down, big clues about Brown’s politics – and how they might affect real people in that mysterious Real World that sometimes rudely intrudes on their game of musical chairs – get lost. One of those missed clues has been the quiet appointment of Bob Shrum, one of the most influential men in American politics, to advise Gordon Brown on the long march to the next general election.
From the moment in 2004 that it was revealed Michael Howard had appointed Lynton Crosby to mastermind his election campaign, it was possible to foresee how the Tory election campaign would flail and fail.

While the Westminster village was trying to divine significance in obscure Shadow Cabinet reshuffles and silly speeches, they could have simply looked up Crosby’s modus operandi. The US is mired in a deteriorating position in Iraq which its own public has ceased to believe in and its leaders have no real idea how to get out of. It has lost its control of events in the Middle East and Iran. It has become isolated from the rest of the world on the environment and become the victim of political developments in Latin America. The limits of its power are being seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. Never has the US had greater need of friends who can deliver allies and support.Instead it has a British Foreign Secretary bouncing along as the teacher’s pet of its Secretary of State and a Prime Minister who cannot, and will not, do anything that could in the minutest way be treated as a criticism of US policy.

Although the presence of Condoleezza Rice at the State Department has changed the tone of Washington’s policy, and put the State Department back in the driving seat of policy presentation, it has not changed policy itself. Declining to send our troops would have given us position in Europe and moral prestige in the Muslim world while still enabling us to claim a special friendship with the US. In a very practical sense, we could have acted as a bridge across the Atlantic and as a genuinely independent voice around the globe.At no point does America need such a voice more than now. When it has come to US military purchases or trade sanctions, environmental policy or aid, there is no point at which London can claim “we made the difference” or point to an American favour which has been directed towards us.No, the real difference that a refusal to participate in the invasion would have made would not have been in our relations with Washington but in our status in Europe and the wider world. Our citizens were still rendered to Guantanamo Bay, our views on Middle East peace were never taken into account when President Bush declared his total support for Sharon, our position on Iran was still undermined by Washington’s refusal to offer any direct concession to Tehran. The south of Iraq was always going to be easier to manage, being largely Shia, while the British tactic of largely leaving security up to the local militias would probably have been followed by the Americans if they had been in charge.On the other side of the coin, it is almost impossible to think of anything we have gained out of going into Iraq which we would have lost if we had not.

In the interests of discrediting British membership of Europe, they asked what if we had never entered the First World War. In a resurgent sense of nationalism, they suggested that we could have kept the Empire if we had left Hitler alone. Yet to ask what would have happened if our political leaders had acted differently in decisions that might have gone either way can at least illuminate the issues. Take the so-called “special relationship” with America which now completely dominates UK foreign policy. As the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and our own dear Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, traipsed around Blackburn and then shot off to Baghdad like inseparable twins, one couldn’t help asking: “What if Britain had declined to accompany America in the invasion of Iraq?”
We could have acted otherwise. Harold Wilson refused to send troops to Vietnam on the grounds that his party would never wear it. Tony Blair could have refused Iraq on the grounds that we couldn’t invade another country legally or politically without another UN resolution.

Indeed Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, half expected us to withdraw at the last minute, and said so famously in public at the time.Our refusal would not have made us popular in Washington, any more than Harold Wilson’s refusal to send British troops to Vietnam. It would have embarrassed President Bush and left the British government looking weak. But then the US administration would have been primarily concerned that Britain did not lead the opposition to the war, which it wouldn’t, not that it didn’t participate. The refusal to join did Harold Wilson no harm in the long run, nor would it have done Tony Blair any great damage.