Still from Betty Boop for President (1932).

Betty Boop is not the only remarkable figure on show in Florida. Henry McLeish is visiting professor of UK and European politics at the University of South Florida. As a wee boy the talented Scot once signed for Leeds United football club. Even more remarkable is the fact that for one year and 12 days between 2000 and 2001 he was First Minister of Scotland.

With the US election taking place, McLeish has recently filed a piece for The Scotsman about the need for the UK to realise that the US today is an unreliable ally and the ‘special relationship’ is over. While it is true that some US allies over here in Blighty are asleep at the wheel, an equal number are firmly gripped on what happens next to the Land of the Free. As military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once said, ‘Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.’

If Harris wins, will there be insurrection on the US streets? (As playwright Tom Stoppard once wrote: ‘It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.’) If Trump wins, will Nato remain intact? (As John F. Kennedy once said: ‘The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.’) On the first point, I don’t know enough to comment. On the second, however, if US support for Ukraine is withdrawn it could dramatically fall to the UK to become the lead military actor in this particular theatre of war. This at a time when UK defence secretary John Healey—much to the chagrin of some UK military—says we are not ready to fight a war because of the hollowing out and underfunding under the Tories.

With the US we are almost always inextricably intertwined. As ex-MI6 head Richard Dearlove said last January, ‘our defensive eggs are in the Nato basket under the nuclear umbrella of the US,’ adding that an over-hasty Trump in the event of regaining the presidency could seriously damage the Atlantic alliance which Dearlove admitted would be ‘a big deal’ and ‘political threat’ for the UK. Even those who do not support Nato will find out pretty fast what a dangerous vacuum feels like. Some people are worried.

While pro-European Moldovans scored a narrow victory against Russia last week, US defence secretary Lloyd Austin announced the Pentagon was sending a further $400 million in arms to Ukraine. But neither means the West will not have to learn one day how to live with the Russian bear. Even if the Kremlin continues tiresome stunts such as the one played on UK diplomats arriving last week at a Moscow airport, jaw-jaw and vodka is surely better than war-war and tactical nuclear weapons—for both sides.

Also last week, former UK foreign secretary David Owen said, ‘If Trump was to come back, there’s very little doubt he would, as he has frequently said, try to settle the Ukraine war and improve relations, personal relations with Putin.’ So how to respond to such a thing? Not that Trump is expected to go quite so far as former MP George Galloway who attended the three-day Brics summit in Kazan, Russia, where Putin was actively promoting his Ukrainian invasion. No, the greatest fear preventing peace talks, possibly on both sides, is the rut of thinking which says peace cannot be achieved without capitulation.

With the advent last week of North Korean troops on European soil, it is understandable from the West’s point of view there are reservations. It is already a global war. Containment, to date, appears not to work, though some blurred recent footage made available on social media recently appears to show Russian soldiers not sure what to with the North Koreans. (Pyongyang has sent an initial 3,000 troops but the final number could be as many as 15,000.) South Korea has already said it may send its own military officers as advisers to Ukraine. And so it goes. To see images of the North Korean flag, even staged or digitally manipulated, hoisted above the over-pounded earth of what Ukrainians call ‘temporarily occupied territory’ is rather like ambling through social media and suddenly coming across World War Three. Will British, possibly French, troops follow? Is there anybody out there?

Kamala Harris’s own road to peace would not be obstacle-free either. I have heard many people over here call her a warmonger. Some of the obstacles facing her will have been shipped out there herself. Surely her biggest problem is whether or not the American people actually want to see a defeated Russia. Look at the sobering ambivalence John Kelly’s remarks were met with when he said Trump fitted ‘into the general definition of fascist’. Not to mention the one about Trump speaking of the loyalty of Hitler’s Nazi generals. (Some of whom actually tried to kill Hitler.)  And what would total war in Ukraine mean for all those resources presumably kept aside for a conflict with China, heaven forbid?

While people in London are generally more sympathetic to the vice president, one or two of our more easily insulted citizens have not forgotten when a visiting Harris made attendees wait one full hour after turning up to make a speech in the UK, and another 25 minutes after being introduced by the ambassador. The speech was only 15 minutes long and included a rebuke to what then was Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government—not that anyone in government now took offence to the rebuke.

However, one American exile I know in London who is neither a Republican nor an admirer of Trump reckons ‘45’ looks on track to win both the popular vote and more importantly the electoral college and become president again. ‘If so,’ he says, ‘the US is likely to follow the example of the state of Texas and sign a broad free-trade agreement with the UK. Further, a Trump administration would likely nudge the EU and other entities to end their continued punishment of the UK for the popular vote to exit the EU, and to forge their own free trade agreements with the UK.’

Certainly, with Brexit responsible for wiping out 40,000 City of London jobs, plus another £140bn ($181.5bn) from the UK economy, which through taxes would have more than filled the country’s now famous economic black hole, things are bad enough without us having to make fresh enemies with both the US and Russia too. The world is too unpredictable as it is. Even Israelis who think a victory for Trump would be a victory for them may not be entirely satisfied in the event of a Trump victory if his love of isolationism really kicks in and he calls for Israel to rely less on the US and more on neighbours such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, one government insider told the Guardian last week that original plans to choreograph a meeting before the election between Harris and Starmer—more of whom later—had been shelved. ‘We’re obviously a number of days out from the campaign and I suspect both candidates are focused on the election,’ they said. Ever since the US candidates were announced, former prime minister Liz Truss and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage have travelled to the US to support the Republican Party. (‘The image of the next President of the United States at a McDonald’s drive-through in a McDonald’s apron putting salt on the chips is one that will live long in the memory,’ wrote a fawning Farage in the Spectator: ‘If he does it again, I’ll volunteer to stand beside him and serve the milkshakes.’) But it was towards Starmer that most recent attention was being directed. (Starmer has already met Trump.)

Last week saw Trump’s team file a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against the UK Labour Party for ‘blatant foreign interference’ on the grounds of overt support for Harris by Labour Party volunteers arriving on American soil. It would already have irked Trump that our foreign secretary David Lammy has called Trump a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’ as well as ‘no friend of Britain’.

Elon Musk is another one caught up in transatlantic sabre-rattling. Only last week he was accused by the Wall Street Journal of being in regular touch with Putin since 2022. While Musk could easily have been mistaken for someone illegally buying votes with his brazen attempts to get potential Republicans to register, he clearly enjoyed just as much knocking the Brits over these Labour Party activists. As UK journalist Suzannah Moore wrote in a normally pro-Republican Telegraph: ‘To still believe in the American Dream where Elon Musk suddenly gives you a million dollars is to close one’s eyes to reality. This, of course, is what Trump excels at. His reality is a moveable feast, which is why the polite but consistent rehearsal of facts exposing his mendacity does not dent him.’ Besides, when does Musk not enjoy knocking Brits? His anti-UK criticisms are so frequent these days that some of us now take them as a compliment.

Of course, there remains in some quarters greater concern over the possibility of Russian interference in the US election. In fact, it is almost as if the Labour Party story is a suitable distraction from this. Many in Blighty already know of the different web domains seized by the Justice Department which were said to be part of Russian government efforts to influence the election. So much has been suspected that I actually missed the news at first of the US offering up to $10 million for information on foreign election interference linked in particular to the Russian state-sponsored Rybar media organisation.

As for formal UK-US relations, contrary to what Professor Henry McLeish said, the Strategic Dialogue led by the two Secretaries of State in September celebrated, even deepened, the so-called special relationship, but could not of course have known who would cross the line first in the forthcoming election, disputed or otherwise. So tight is the race that some of us over here no longer know where to look–and we aren’t even American. In fact, it is one of those rare moments when those of us who have enjoyed living in the US realise just how oddly apolitical our love of the nation is. We worry for them like we worry for our own. Because we have turned our backs on our EU allies through Brexit, without the US we could so easily become this tiny and irrelevant life raft, floating northwards in the loose direction of Iceland, singing sea shanties no one but ourselves understand. There, if you like, is the lesson we can bring of isolationism.

Finally, the BBC has picked its 10 best films about US presidential elections. Primary Colors came in first followed by All The President’s Men. Good, also, to see The War Room by Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. The others were Wag the Dog, The Best Man, State of the Union, The American President, The Ides of March, Game Change, Head of State. At the very end, however, was a bonus short—Dave Fleisher’s Betty Boop for President which was made in 1932. In this, Betty Boop runs against Mr Nobody and wins by a landslide. At the end of the day, I suspect one or two Brits might now cheer for that.

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