The 'special' junior partnership

Private Eye (No 1268) recently made fun of David Cameron's claim that Britain was the junior partner to the United States in 1940 when it was fighting the Nazis.

If Cameron wants to brush up on his history he could do worse than read Brian Urquhart's review of Max Hasting's new book:

In 1940 the United States [which did not enter the war until 11 December 1941] was by no means wholly sympathetic to British war requirements, and a large majority of the people and in the Congress were determined to stay out of another European war...Of the disastrous year 1941, Hastings writes:

American assistance fell far short of British hopes, and Churchill not infrequently vented his bitterness at the ruthlessness of the financial terms extracted by Washington for supplies. "As far as I can make out", he wrote to Chancellor [of the Exchequer] Kingsley Wood, "we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone."

St Margaret's Bay