A key Hillary Clinton confidant told her that British Prime Minister David Cameron was “unsure, inexperienced, oblique and largely uncommitted” on foreign policy, new emails reveal.
The messages from Sidney Blumenthal, a former White House aide to Bill Clinton, also claim that the “special relationship” between the US and Britain – cultivated by such leaders and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – was being destroyed by “the Obama administration’s denigration of the UK.”
The emails, seen by The Times, date from 2009 when Mrs Clinton was Secretary of State and before Cameron became Prime Minister.
In one message from October that year, Mr Blumenthal tells Clinton how “a Cameron government would be more aristocratic and even narrowly Etonian . . . Sharply contrasting especially with the striving and classless perspective of the grocer’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher.”
He adds: “So far [Mr Cameron’s] foreign policy is little more than a projection of his domestic politics, especially his need to keep his party behind him going into the election. His political imperatives have pressured him to lean right . . . His future problem is that he does not want to be the leader who takes Britain out of Europe but he is putting himself in a position where he may not be able to prevent his party doing so.”
At the time there were also rumours of Tony Blair being appointed EU President, a decision that Clinton appeared to favour, the paper claims.
Other messages call Mayor of London Boris Johnson “the Tory clown prince” and described then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s attempts to prevent David Miliband becoming next Labour leader as “like the Tudors”. Clinton responded, saying she is “very sorry to hear this confirmation”, suggesting she saw David Miliband as a potential ally.
The messages were among the thousands handed over by Mrs Clinton to the State Department earlier this year. She insisted she only used her private account for unclassified material, but dozens of emails reportedly contained classified information.
Critics say her private email account allowed her to hide sensitive information from freedom of information requests while leaving it vulnerable to foreign hackers.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said: “The special relationship between the UK and the United States is as strong as ever and the President recently acknowledged the importance of the alliance to the US.”
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