Every Londoner now knows how it must have felt to be a citizen of Gaul, preparing for a visit from the Roman Emperor
Bush's visit will be expensive, but America has paid many times over
By Tom Utley
News Telegraph
You can tell that the most important person in the world is coming to London, simply by walking around. Look up, and you will see helicopters circling, day and night. Whitehall and the Mall are thronged with armed police. Cars are being stopped and searched at random, from Park Lane to the East End. Crowd control barriers are going up everywhere, while beneath the pavements, uniformed men are searching the sewers for bombs. And he won't even be here until Tuesday night.
To stroll around the city centre this weekend is to take a crash course in the geopolitics of the modern world. Yes, we all knew that America was the only superpower remaining on Earth, and that its President was the world's most powerful politician. But it is only when you see the helicopters, the mobile communications centres, the roadblocks, the uniforms and the guns that the full significance of those facts comes home. Every Londoner now knows how it must have felt to be a citizen of Gaul, preparing for a visit from the Roman Emperor.
I am old enough to remember the two visits to Britain made by John F Kennedy, when he was US President - first in the summer of 1961, when he came to attend a family christening, and then in June 1963, five months before his assassination. As a schoolboy, I was mightily impressed by Kennedy's motorcade on that first visit, when he was driven up the Mall in an open-top Bentley, with Jackie following in a blue-grey Rolls-Royce. The convoy had no fewer than 20 motorcycle outriders. I had never seen anything like it.
Two years later, when Kennedy visited Harold Macmillan at Birch Grove in Sussex, I laughed with everyone else at the story of the president's blood. He always travelled, we were told, with a reserve supply of his own blood, for transfusion in case of an emergency.
The story went that his secret servicemen asked Lady Dorothy Macmillan to put the presidential blood in her fridge. She refused, on the grounds that the very thought of keeping human blood in the same fridge as her dogfood was perfectly disgusting. The blood went off, and stank out the house. But as we schoolboys laughed, we all thought: "Wow!" It was quite something, if a little melodramatic, to be so immensely important that you couldn't travel anywhere without an emergency supply of your own blood. Five months later, of course, we were to learn why this had been a sensible precaution.
But if we schoolboys of the 1960s thought those two visits pretty groovy, think how much more impressed today's generation must be by the descriptions in the press of President Bush's entourage. It is said that he will be bringing with him as many as 250 secret service agents. Then there will be perhaps 150 advisers from the National Security department and about 200 other civil servants, as well as 50-odd political aides from the White House. Mr Bush will be travelling with his own chef and a team of four other cooks. There will be 15 American sniffer-dogs and their handlers.
So much for the personnel: now for the hardware. The President will be arriving in a convoy of three jumbo jets - two identical Boeing 747-200s, reserved for presidential use, and a third one on charter. He will have his own US Marine Corps Sikorsky Sea King helicopter and a Black Hawk, fitted out specially for protecting him. (I love the story, although I am not sure whether or not to believe it, that the Queen has refused to allow the Black Hawk to hover over Buckingham Palace during the President's visit, ready to shoot down any attacking aircraft, on the grounds that it would be "too noisy".) It is rumoured that he will have not one, but two identical motorcades, each 20 cars strong, including his own armoured Cadillac Deville.
Many Britons are kicking up a fuss about all the disruption that the President's visit will cause, and the cost of the security operation to the Treasury. This seems extraordinarily mean-spirited to me. Even if the cost is 10 times greater than the £5 million figure that is being bandied about, it seems a small price to pay for policing the first state visit to Britain by an American President.
I mentioned the Roman Empire earlier, and I am reminded of the brilliant scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which the leader of a Judaean terrorist organisation asks : "What did the Romans ever do for us?" The answer to that question went on for ages. (They gave us aqueducts, education, sanitation, decent roads, the rule of law.)
It occurs to me that the answer would be equally long if the question were now put: "What did the Americans do for us?" For a start, they twice saved us from German tyranny, entering conflicts that were not obviously their own; they rebuilt the economies of Europe and Japan; they gave democracy a chance all over the world; they gave us Hollywood and The Simpsons, the internet and the Boeing 747. Britain's greatest ever contribution to civilisation was the liberal democracy upon which America was founded, and for which its President is now the chief standard-bearer. How dare people quibble about the cost of his visit, when America has paid us a billion times more, in blood and dollars?
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