Way back in 1917, an editorial  in the Spectator entitled “The United States and Britain” spoke thus: “It would be easy to write down a hundred reasons why unclouded friendship and moral co-operation between the United States and Britain are a benefit to the world, and why an interruption of such relations is a detriment to progress and a disease world-wide in its effects. 

“Quarrelling and misunderstanding between the British and American peoples are like a thing contrary to Nature. They are so contrary to Nature that the times of misunderstanding have always seemed to us abnormal, and a return to friendship not an achievement of wise diplomacy (as one might feel such a result to be in our relations with other countries) but merely a resumption of the normal.”