“A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend.

And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger.

And the president should be prepared for that.” Thus said Hugh Grant, playing the British prime minister confronting the president of the United States of America in a famous scene in the romcom, Love Actually.

The real-life British prime minister, Keir Starmer, has attempted to stand up ever so slightly to the current bully in the White House over the latest American war in the Middle East.

Despite the British government’s right-royal efforts to flatter the US president, Donald Trump, ever since he was elected, his response to Starmer’s little attempt has been a torrent of contempt.

So the reality is not Love Actually.

It’s Contempt Actually.

Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, the MAGA ideologue, Steve Bannon, tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward, "That’s diplomatic b***s**t… You’re either an ally or you’re not… The special relationship is over." Ah, the ‘special relationship’! It must be forty years since I first heard the former West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, say, "the special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.” An American critic of Trump recently asked me the obvious follow-up question: “Why does your government keep grovelling?” More fundamentally, we must ask why so much of official Britain, and especially its security Establishment, keeps clinging for dear life to the US, behaving for all the world like someone stuck in an abusive personal relationship.

To be fair, a lot of other European leaders have spent much of the last year sacrificing their dignity as they suck up to Trump, condoning his trashing of everything liberal Europe has stood for since 1945.

Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO, would beat Starmer to win the premier medal of the satirical magazine, Private Eye, not the OBE (Order of the British Empire) but the OBN (Order of the Brown Nose).

The reasons for this sycophancy are obvious: Europe’s dependence on the US for supporting Ukraine, for our own security in NATO and, to a significant degree, for our prosperity.

But there’s a particular, rather pathetic, desperation about the way the British cling to Uncle Sam.

The explanation? History, of course.

The US’s founding fathers grew up thinking of themselves as Englishmen.

From 1776 to 1917, when the US entered the First World War, this was, as the historian, Robert Saunders, nicely puts it, not so much a special as a peculiar relationship.

The US defined itself historically against Britain, but there was a mutual fascination.

Following the brief but important military alliance in 1917-18, and the subsequent peacemaking in Paris, the US withdrew from Europe.

A special relationship really did exist between 1941, when Winston Churchill managed — with a little help from the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor — to bring the US into the war against Adolf Hitler, and 1956, when the US humiliatingly stopped Britain and France from retaking the Suez Canal.

The United Kingdom and the US were not equals, but this was still a real power partnership, jointly shaping Europe,....