The transatlantic delusions of the Westminster Wing

The rise of Asia has introduced a quirk into Anglo-American relations. British intellectuals have become loud in their certainty that the US is about to lose global primacy, just as their own country did in the last century.

Their assumption is complacent and often couched in the grating idiom of "Hard luck, old boy". But there is an even worse habit that overcomes British elites in American company, and it is the opposite of declinist condescension. It is fascination bordering on awe.

Our politico-media class becomes more mesmerised by its American equivalent with each generation. This goes beyond holidaying in Cape Cod, as Gordon Brown did as chancellor of the exchequer, or being convivial with the US president, which is the first diplomatic duty of any western leader. It is a narrow immersion in political Americana - to the exclusion of the wider world, and of the non-political dimensions of America itself.

Our politicians hire American electoral advisers as though Washington and Westminster were comparable polities. When they arrive, they see they cannot buy television advertising, or raise serious sums of money, or treat the election as a two-party race, and they quietly recede. Neither the Conservatives' Jim Messina nor the Labour party's David Axelrod - both of whom served Barack Obama with distinction - are central to the UK general election campaign. That is not for any want of talent on their part. The two countries are just too different.

Our politicians pore over Robert Caro's books about Lyndon Johnson - presumably for guidance on how to master a Senate that does not exist in Westminster. Home entertainment for London's media set is House of Cards - the HBO version, naturally - or schlocky old episodes of the West Wing.

Then there is the embarrassingly fevered interest in US presidential elections two years before polling day. Politicians who cannot name the European commissioner for regulation, whose every diktat impinges on our prospects, will have strong views on some upstart congressman in the Great Plains who is mulling a shot as someone else's running mate. Whitehall bag-carriers in their mid-twenties will sagely dissect the Democratic field in their lunch break, referring to Hillary Clinton by her first name as though they have just come from a daily meeting with her.

America deserves the attention, of course. For global clout, cultural vitality, technological miracles, it is nonpareil among nations. But these are not the things that captivate our elites, whose curiosity seems to start and end with the micro-world of Washington, occasionally spreading as far as academic New England.

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What we have instead is obtuse Beltway gossip among people whose nearest Beltway is actually London's M25. There is a kind of inverted colonial cringe at work here: the ruling tier of the Old Country hankering after the might and glamour of the New. It is needy and unbecoming, like a wallflower clinging to the popular guy at a party.

The neuroses show up in the Americanised language of Westminster and Fleet Street. It has become normal to talk of "game-changers" and "war rooms", as if election campaigns were next of kin to the Super Bowl and Pentagon operations, rather than the dowdy and mercifully brief affairs they tend to be in this country.

"Hell yes": those are the most vivid words of the campaign so far, and they came from Ed Miliband, the Labour leader. No actual person in Britain talks like that. We are approaching the point where an excited politician says "Darn tootin'!" to some baffled crowd in Edgbaston or Harrow.

British conservatives will cite this fixation with America as proof that cultural affinity within the Anglosphere transcends anything as ephemeral as the EU. But if that were true, it would be reciprocated. US Congressional aides would convene at water coolers to discuss the latest Westminster caper. They do not, and neither do politicos in Australia or Canada.

They will know that our prime minister is David Cameron. They might know that Mr Miliband wants his job. They have probably heard of Boris Johnson, the guy with the funny hair who runs London. At that point, the knowledge and interest thins. They do not pretend that another country's politics can serve as the background hum of their own.

Even if there are deep and ancestral reasons why people in British public life feel gripped by the US, and not Europe, they do not accord with any reading of the national interest. America is the most powerful country in the world but its day-by-day influence over Britain is nothing like as great as the EU's, as eurosceptics themselves would agree.

A grown-up political class would give up trying to live vicariously through Washington, and try to get their heads around Brussels, Berlin and Paris. The European Parliament and its workings, the relative presence of different nationalities in official roles, the undulating balance of power between various capitals on the continent: all of this is dull, all of it is vital. A serious British politician or pundit, even (or especially) if he or she is eurosceptic, should be conversant with these subjects. They are matters of national destiny.

Instead, there is almost a jovial pride in ignorance, an impatience to get back to another episode of Kevin Spacey and his dastardly drawl. What would we think of a Portuguese politician who knew little of Brussels but stayed abreast of Brazil?

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