Pinter's characters speak in silences, but Pinter himself can't shut up. He welcomed the president with a letter in the Guardian, the journal of the British left. "I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair," he wrote. "Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments."
Pinter is identified with the Theater of the Absurd, but he has lots of competition in his pursuit of theatrical absurdity. One protest group called on marchers to moon Bush: "Bare Your Bum at Bush." Others trotted out tired, gun-totin' Texas clichés. A correspondent for the BBC described the president as "George Custer in the badlands of Dakota."
Andrew Murray, leader of the Stop the War Coalition, reached back to 1066 for a comparison: The president, he said, "was the most unwelcome visitor to these shores since William the Conqueror." The many Muslims in the crowd were eager to invoke the remembrance of the Crusades. They united in Trafalgar Square to pull down a papier-mâché effigy of the president in remembrance of Saddam Hussein.
The president had a mocking zinger of his own. "We have that at home, too," he said of the noisy protests. "They now have that right in Baghdad as well." The irony is not lost on the young. A poll by the Guardian found that a majority of "twentysomethings" in Britain actually welcomed the president.
Queen Elizabeth, like Tony Blair, toasted the special relationship. America and Britain, she said, are like close friends who have their spats, and can disagree with each other. But they know how to make up quickly.
She might have been reading Churchill, too. "No people respond more spontaneously to fair play," said the man whose eloquence and common sense was one of the super weapons of that earlier war to save the West. "If you treat Americans well, they always want to treat you better."