Daily Mail
"Having just returned from a trip to the U.S., I have seen first hand how successful President Obama has been in persuading his country that Britain - and Britain alone - is to blame for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In an act of pure spite and calculated political expediency, he has vilified BP to boost his own waning popularity.We all know how much Hollywood loves a British villain, but there's something deeply offensive about the way Obama has turned BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, into a hate figure.Hayward's vicious treatment at the hands of the Senate Inquiry on Thursday was nothing short of disgraceful.Let's be clear: I don't defend BP's mistakes, but the oil spill was an accident, not some wilful act of malice on the company's part. And it certainly isn't remotely comparable to the September 11 attacks, as President Obama so stupidly claimed. ....Our Prime Minister should have pointed out - loud and clear - the hypocrisy of the world's worst polluting country turning on its closest ally.He should have reminded Obama, too, that the U.S. took 20 years to settle the claims from the Exxon Valdez oil spill - and even then, many of the original compensation deals were slashed by the courts.Or how about the Bhopal disaster in India, when between 2,200 and 15,000 people died after a gas leak ( depending on whether you take the U.S. estimates or the Indian government's)? That tragedy happened in 1984 and victims' families are still fighting for compensation.But perhaps what I find most upsetting about this sorry affair is how little the special relationship clearly means to Mr Obama - a relationship that has bound his country and ours through a century of war and peace, but which has recently sucked Britain into one illegal war in Iraq and an unwinnable one in Afghanistan.If President Obama really is so contemptuous of the British, perhaps he'd allow us to bring home our 10,000 troops fighting by his soldiers' side in Helmand.
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