Every September at the “last night of the proms”, the climax of the annual London festival of classical music, thousands of Britons sing Edward Elgar’s patriotic hymn “Land of Hope and Glory”, with its stirring line: “Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set”.

The mordant 20th century British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge quipped that it would be more fitting for the line to read “narrower still and narrower shall thy bounds be set”. Yet even Muggeridge, for all his sense of increasingly threadbare nature of Britain’s imperial pretentions, would surely struggle to credit the sheer magnitude of British decline. And though much given to ridiculing Britain’s self-deceiving “special relationship” with the US, he might also be surprised by just how demeaning an aspect that relationship has latterly assumed. Britain’s Labour prime minister of the 1960s, Harold Wilson, at least preserved a measure of national self-respect by refusing to commit British troops to the Vietnam War, while the Tory prime minister of the early 1970s, Edward Heath, bluntly refused to do America’s bidding. Nobody in those days foresaw the emergence of Tony Blair, a British leader who would act like an American agent, slavishly endorsing US foreign policy, even as he brazenly presented himself as a staunch British patriot and world statesman.

So extravagant were Blair’s professions of fealty to the US it hardly seemed possible that any future British leader could match them if he tried. As it happened, the early indications were that his successor Gordon Brown intended, politely but firmly, to distance himself from Washington. The business-like approach he adopted when he visited the White House last summer to meet US President George W. Bush suggested that Brown had got the message that British people felt humiliated by the image Blair had projected of Britain as America’s obedient servant. The favorable opinion poll ratings Brown initially enjoyed stemmed in part from the simple fact that he was not Tony Blair, but they were almost certainly bolstered by his evident determination to establish a fresh and more dignified relationship between Britain and the US.

It seemed a clear sign of this determination that Brown recruited as an adviser the former UN secretary— general’s chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, a known critic of American foreign policy, who asserted that Britain and the US would no longer to be “joined at the hip”. Yet it has rapidly become plain that this show of independence was nothing but window-dressing. Already, Malloch Brown has been forced to eat his words, insisting that they were taken out of context and that he is in fact a great admirer of the US. The former UN dignitary may still be smarting from the excoriating personality-assassination to which he was subjected in the pages of the Spectator, the right-wing London weekly formerly renowned for its unpredictability but now a wholly predictable mouthpiece of American neoconservatism. If Malloch Brown has been punished for his presumption, so too has Brown’s Foreign Secretary David Milliband, who was obliged to rewrite a pro-European speech which was deemed to evince insufficient zeal for America as the global hegemon. The official British message — as set out in Brown’s major speech last week, in which he backed the bellicose US foreign policy toward Iran — remains that Britain’s relationship with the US is supremely important. It was widely noted that Brown’s act of self-abasement came soon after the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy returned from Washington, having done his utmost to demonstrate that France is America’s new best friend. That Downing Street was fretting that France might be upstaging Britain as Washington’s favorite European stooge was all too apparent.

The extent to which British political culture has become subservient to that of the US has been further underscored by the disclosure of Brown’s reliance on the superannuated American spin doctor, Bob Shrum. Hardly noticed by the British media, this so-called “uber-consultant”, who was involved in no fewer than eight US presidential campaigns, is currently working part-time for Brown and, according to Newsweek, enjoying a level of access to the prime minister comparable to that of a senior Cabinet member. Shrum was one of those who urged Brown to call a “snap” general election, a course of action from which the notoriously circumspect Brown ultimately withdrew, leaving himself looking both cynical and indecisive. He also furnished Brown with key phrases for his party conference speech, phrases that turned out to have been recycled from a speech Shrum wrote for a previous client, former US Vice President, Al Gore. “Sometimes people say I’m too serious” and “I will never let you down” were among the lapidary Shrum coinages of which Brown availed himself.

Few now believe that Brown will not let them down. Combined with Britain’s faltering economy and the hugely damaging revelation that his government presided over the loss of confidential data on 25 million British citizens, Brown’s compromised foreign policy has led to plunging opinion polls ratings: His administration may not survive its full term. Yet there is no reason to suppose that British foreign policy under a Conservative government led by David Cameron will not continue to be made in Washington. What chiefly distinguishes Britain’s two main political parties is not policy but personalities and presentation. Only the ineffectual Liberal Democratic Party is warning that Britain may end up supporting yet another catastrophic US military intervention in the Middle East. Nothing if not receptive to the Zionist lobby, David Cameron is not only no less pro-American than Gordon Brown, he is also every bit as fervent in his support for Israel. In short, so long as the neoconservatives hold sway in Washington, Britain is likely to carry on lining up with them no matter which party is in power.

In contrast to Tony Blair, Brown has a reputation for being an intellectual, for the width of his reading. But there is little evidence that he is attentive to the more informed analyses of the US/Iran stand-off, as exemplified by Trita Parsi’s new study “Treacherous Alliance: the Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US”, a book that challenges the ascendancy of neoconservative thinking, with its paranoid faith in the efficacy of military force, and which argues for constructive engagement with the Iran. Like Blair, Brown will be remembered not for creative statesmanship but for consolidating Britain’s latter-day status as an abject appendage of the United States.