Gerard Baker offers a rather surprising view in today’s Financial Times (subscribers only). “US statesmen used to say derisively that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a role. They do not say that any more. A White House official who knows a bit about these things remarked to me recently that Britain could now plausibly claim to be the second most important country on earth. Politically, diplomatically, economically, the UK exercises an influence over the globe way beyond its geographic insignificance.”
I agree with the final sentence, but I’m less sure about the “second most important” line. Not that it matters much. In my glimpse of these matters, doing work for Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit, there is a lot of truth to Baker’s assertions. During Davos in New York, I collared a host of major US and international figures for a couple of projects I was working on. Without exception, they made a point of emphasising to me that British views punched above its weight. Given some of the people I was speaking to, I don’t think it was just diplomatic flattery.