Barack Obama’s long-awaited post-presidential memoir A Promised Land has finally been released, promising to give some juicy insights into the most powerful job on earth.
Naturally, some of this will also include mention of the UK and its leaders during the time he was in office from 2008 to 2016.
It should be noted that this is only the first volume of the president’s memoirs and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
As such there is no mention of how he viewed Brexit and the EU referendum so we’ll have to wait until the next book to learn that.
On the Queen
Way back in 2009, Michelle Obama threw out the royal protocol handbook and dared to hug the Queen while wearing a cardigan over a dress.
It was a move that sent UK newspapers and commentators into a spin, or as President Obama put it a “horrified tizzy”.
He also reveals that “the Queen didn’t seem to mind, slipping her arm around Michelle in return”.
He writes: “Michelle had decided to join me for the first half of the trip, which made me happy. She was less concerned with my performance at the summit—‘You’ll be fine’—than she was with how to dress for our planned audience with Her Majesty the Queen of England. ‘You should wear one of those little hats,’ I said. “And carry a little handbag.”
“She gave me a mock scowl. ‘That’s not helpful.’
“At a reception for the G20 leaders and their spouses with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, she was photographed with her hand resting on Her Majesty’s shoulder—an apparent breach of royalty-commoner protocol, although the Queen didn’t seem to mind, slipping her arm around Michelle in return. Also, Michelle wore a cardigan sweater over her dress during our private meeting with the queen, sending Fleet Street into a horrified tizzy.
″‘You should have taken my suggestion and worn one of those little hats,’ I told her the next morning. ‘And a little matching handbag!’ She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. ‘And I hope you enjoy sleeping on a couch when you get home,’ she said brightly. ‘The White House has so many to choose from!’”
In 2018, Michelle revealed the true reason for the affection moment with the monarch – they had just bonded over having sore feet.
On David Cameron
For the majority of his two terms in office, Obama’s UK counterpart was David Cameron, who he says had the “easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life” (a debatable opinion given the tragic death of his son in 2009).
Obama reveals the two liked each other on a personal level “even when we butted heads” as they worked together on a range of international issues.
He writes: “In his early forties, with a youthful appearance and a studied informality (at every international summit, the first thing he’d do was take off his jacket and loosen his tie), the Eton-educated Cameron possessed an impressive command of the issues, a facility with language, and the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life.
“I liked him personally, even when we butted heads, and for the next six years he’d prove to be a willing partner on a host of international issues, from climate change (he believed in the science) to human rights (he supported marriage equality) to aid for developing countries (throughout his tenure, he’d managed to allocate 1.5 percent of the UK’s budget to foreign aid, a significantly higher percentage than I’d ever convince the US Congress to approve).”
On austerity
One area where Obama does express disagreement with Cameron is on the latter’s embrace of austerity as a reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, suggesting the UK’s economic woes in the 2010s were predictable.
He writes: “Cameron hewed closely to free-market orthodoxy, having promised voters that his platform of deficit reduction and cuts to government services—along with regulatory reform and expanded trade—would usher in a new era of British competitiveness.
“Instead, predictably, the British economy would fall deeper into a recession.”
On Gordon Brown
Obama has slightly less favourable words for Cameron’s predecessor, Labour PM Gordon Brown who “lacked the sparkly political gifts of [Tony Blair].”
Overall however, he expresses a favourable view and commends his handling of the 2008 financial crash.
He writes: “A former chancellor of the exchequer in Tony Blair’s Labour government, Brown lacked the sparkly political gifts of his predecessor (it seemed as if every media mention of Brown included the term ‘dour’), and he’d suffered the misfortune of finally getting his turn at the prime ministership just as Britain’s economy was collapsing and its public was tiring of the Labour Party’s decade-long run.
“But he was thoughtful, responsible, and understood global finance, and although his time in office would prove short-lived, I was fortunate to have him as a partner during those early months of the crisis.”
On UK school kids
On a non-political point, there’s a remarkable anecdote about the effect Michelle Obama had on the children she met.
The First Lady visited the all-girls Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington in 2009 in what was her first public speech abroad in the role.
She told her rapt audience she was finding her new job challenging and was “overwhelmed by the pace, unworthy of the glamour, anxious about our children, and uncertain of my purpose”.
President Obama writes: “At the school, she talked about her own childhood and the barriers she’d had to overcome, how education had always provided her a path forward. The girls—working-class, many of them of West Indian or South Asian descent—listened in rapt attention as this glamorous woman insisted that she had once been just like them. In the coming years, she’d visit with students from the school several times, including hosting a group of them at the White House.
“Later, an economist would study the data and conclude that Michelle’s engagement with the school had led to a notable spike in the students’ standardised test scores, suggesting that her message of aspiration and connection made a true and measurable difference.
“This ‘Michelle Effect’ was something I was very familiar with—she had the same effect on me. Things like this helped us remember that our work as a First Family wasn’t solely a matter of politics and policy.”