I’ve already written a fair bit about the Chatham House conference I attended recently, but I did just want to add something about the excellent points made at it by William Wallace about the UK’s position in relation to the EU and the US.

For he did a very good job of highlighting some of the choices faced by the UK.

We are in many ways prisoners of the way in which the British public and media like to see some of these issues, which does lead us into some quite odd positions. This view, which he says in a phrase he ascribed to Timothy Garton-Ash, sees everything that Britain has done since 1945 as ”˜footnotes to Churchill’, makes us very worried about any encroachment by ”˜Europe’, but almost totally unconcerned by any such thing by the USA.

On the European side, the British press are fiercely keen to protect British independence in foreign policy, and determined not to allow any European to tell us what to do, almost (if not quite) to the point of not being willing to support co-operation with other European countries on foreign and military matters at all.

But yet the various European initiatives in the foreign policy field in recent years, such as the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), which potentially allow Britain to project its point of view with much greater force through the additional support of 26 other countries, have in fact been very largely driven not by suspect foreigners, but by the British government itself. And furthermore, many of the key individuals in the organisations taking them forward, have themselves been British (in fact as he made this point, the person sitting next to him on the platform was perhaps the most influential Brit in any international institution, Robert Cooper!).

But all this does not stop British public opinion being constantly worried about European action - something which is all the more paradoxical given something that Peter Kellner of YouGov said in another session later in the day, that in fact British suspicion of Europe is not so much of the institutional structures, as distrust of the people in those institutions.

However by contrast when it comes to American actions which might encroach on British sovereignty, British public opinion is far less concerned. William quoted the example of Menwith Hill, a US listening post which will in future be used as a base for US missiles, which is on British soil and is many ways a major military base which is outside the control of the UK Government. While there is some concern about cession of UK sovereignty to the US, it is highly peripheral compared to the mainstream concern about ceding sovereignty to the EU - despite the fact that the NATO treaty is on any reading a far more definite commitment of the UK to military action, with no legal option of a “veto” than any possible EU foreign or defence activity that has ever been seriously discussed.

Clearly the question of whether the UK wants to have a good relationship on foreign policy with the USA, or with the rest of the EU, only needs to be asked for it to be clear how meaningless a question it is. But William made the case very well for how unbalanced the approach of British public opinion currently is to it.

And he left us too with a good thought-provoking way of thinking about it. When George Bush’s father entered the White House in 1989, apparently he had been sufficiently annoyed as Vice President by the closeness of Ronald Reagan’s relationship with Margaret Thatcher, that he went out of his way to ensure that the first foreign leader to visit Washington after his inauguration was German, and not British.

Over the last year of his son’s Presidency, should Britain be focussing on making sure that its Prime Minister is the first foreign leader into Washington after the new President’s inauguration in January 2009 - or on ensuring that when that President first comes touring Europe later in that spring, that he finds a and relatively united European voice articulating the interests of Britain?