The United Kingdom’s ambassador said that the United States’s “special relationship” was with Israel rather than its mother country, in leaked comments that have sent shockwaves around Washington, D.C.
U.K. Ambassador Sir Christian Turner, who took over from the scandal-ridden Peter Mandelson, has found himself in a scandal of his own after several controversial remarks made to U.K. students were leaked to the Financial Times. In a series of comments made in mid-February, Turner voiced his surprise that more U.S. figures hadn’t been taken down by the Epstein scandal, and suggested that Prime Minister Keir Starmer was “on the ropes” over the scandal. His most controversial comments, however, were those downplaying the U.K.’s storied relationship with his host country.
“‘Special Relationship’ is a phrase I try not to utter ’cause it’s quite nostalgic, it’s quite backwards-looking, and it has a lot of baggage around it,” Turner said.
“I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States — and that is probably Israel,” he said.
His comments were made weeks before the U.S. and Israel carried out their first joint combat operations against Iran, the first time the two had fought as direct co-belligerents.
Despite his downplaying of the relationship, Turner did cede that the U.K.-U.S. relationship was still “so strong,” due to a “deep history and affinity,” including modern ties on “defense and security.”
“The relationship will carry on, if you want, being ‘special’, but I think it’s going to have to be different,” he said.
“These were private, informal comments made to a group of UK sixth-form students visiting the US in early February,” the British Foreign Office said in a statement. “They are certainly not any reflection of the UK Government’s position.”
His comments came during an informal discussion on diplomacy and politics and weren’t intended to be on the record.
Turner’s comments come just ahead of King Charles III’s state visit to the U.S. and threaten to put a damper on what was set to be an optimistic showcase of the storied “special relationship.”
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Despite the U.S. beginning with a war of independence against the U.K., followed a few decades later by a war that burned Washington, D.C., to the ground, the cultural connections between the two giants led them to quickly reconcile. The bond was cemented after they fought alongside each other as two primary belligerents of the Entente in World War I, and then the Allies in World War II. The U.K. is commonly held up as the U.S.’s closest ally by historians and analysts. President Donald Trump himself is a known Anglophile.
British ambassadors to the U.S. have a long history of scandalizing relations between the two through leaked comments. The 1888 election between Republican Benjamin Harrison and Democrat Grover Cleveland swung in favor of the former after then-British Ambassador Lionel Sackville-West told someone he thought was a British citizen that Cleveland best served the interests of the U.K. The “Murchison letter” led to widespread anti-British backlash over the perception of foreign interference and sparked outrage among Irish Americans who flocked to Harrison, costing Cleveland the election.
Mabinty Quarshie contributed to this report.