[This is the headline over a report in today's edition of The Sunday Telegraph. It reads in part:]
The Foreign Affairs Committee says it is time to reconsider the term "the special relationship", which it complains is overused by politicians and the media, serving "simultaneously to devalue its meaning and to raise unrealistic expectations about the benefits the relationship can deliver to the UK." (...)
Heather Conley and Reginald Dale from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies told a hearing: "There is clear evidence that Europe (and thus Britain) is much less important to the Obama administration than it was to previous US administrations, and the Obama administration appears to be more interested in what it can get out of the special relationship than in the relationship itself."
The release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi by the Scottish executive was strongly criticised by the US, and Hillary Clinton's call for Britain to sit down with Argentina to "resolve the issues" around the Falklands was not appreciated in London.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former ambassador to the United Nations, told the Committee that when the UK has disagreements with the United States in official business, "we play out those disagreements, we argue with the United States, in private.
"We tend not to argue in public unless public explanation is necessary or we are having a great row about something that cannot be kept out of the public domain," he said.
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