There was Barack Obama-fever in Westminster yesterday when the former US president dropped in at No 10 for an impromptu meeting with the Prime Minister. And Rishi Sunak wasn’t the only British politician trying to catch a little of his star power.
President Obama was also reunited with David Cameron, now Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, at a grand dinner held last night at Winfield House, the US Ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park. The pair were chummy when they served simultaneously as Potus and PM, shooting basketball hoops together and the like. But things got awkward toward the end of their tenures when Obama said Britain would be at “the back of the queue” for trade deals if we left the EU, in a clumsy bid to push the vote Cameron’s way, and suggested Britain was a “free rider” in Nato. They are now firmly back on good terms.
Also at the dinner last night was David Lammy, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary and therefore a rival for Cameron’s job. He is always keen to tout his credentials as an acquaintance of the former president since, long ago, the pair were at Harvard University together. They remain fierce friends and Lammy was dubbed one of the best-connected politicians in the UK when Obama won the presidency back in 2008.
The most tenuous Obama connection of them all though comes from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who once had a Zoom call with the former president during the 2021 lockdown (arranged by Lammy).
In it, Starmer spoke about his troubled relationship with his toolmaker father Rodney. Obama encouraged him to emote more on this subject to build a connection with voters, as he himself had done in his vaunted memoir Dreams from my Father. Only last month that conversation bore fruit with the publication of Keir Starmer: The Biography, written by journalist Tom Baldwin. Perhaps Starmer’s book title lacked some of the same poetry?
