Anger at honorary knighthood for Brown’s old friend Ted Kennedy
Although the honorary knighthood awarded to Senator Edward Kennedy(pictured with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams) was formally recommended by the British Embassy in Washington, it is almost certain that Gordon Brown played a personal role in the decision. Kennedy is one of Brown's oldest political friends in America - a reminder that the PM is a long-time Americanophile who, until he felt he had to do the populist thing on becoming PM and take bucket-and-spade holidays in Britain, used to spend his summers on Cape Cod.
In his speech to Congress yesterday, Brown specifically cited Kennedy's work in the Northern Ireland peace process as a reason for the honour. "Northern Ireland today is at peace. More Americans have health care.
Children around the world are going to school," Brown said. "And for all those things, we owe a great debt to the life and courage of Senator Edward Kennedy."
But despite Kennedy's grand old man status - he's 77 and has spent a long winter in Miami, recuperating from surgery for a brain tumour - he remains a controversial figure.
His 46 years in the Senate have been overshadowed by the incident in 1969 when he drove his car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. He managed to free himself, but he left a girl travelling with him, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown in the submerged car. He received a two-month suspended jail sentence, and four decades on has still never spoken frankly about the incident.
And while he is being honored for his role in swaying Irish American public opinion during the Northern Ireland peace process, the fact is he took a hard pro-Republican anti-British Government line throughout the Troubles.
The historian Andrew Roberts says the honorary knighthood is "obscene". Writing in the Daily Mail today, he says: "Only after 9/11 - when Americans discovered on their own soil how loathsome terrorism truly is, and how far from a noble romantic struggle - did Kennedy cynically distance himself from [Gerry] Adams and fellow Sinn Fein stalwart Martin McGuinness, refusing to meet them in 2005 after the IRA brutally murdered Robert McCartney in a Belfast bar in January that year."
Roberts goes on: "Ted Kennedy did his damnedest to poison US-UK relations over Ulster during the long decades in which he has castigated successive British governments. Rather than expressing any genuine commitment to peace in Northern Ireland, he would always play exclusively to his own Catholic-Irish voters in Massachusetts."
The award has already brought criticism from two leading Tories. Lord Tebbit, the former party chairman whose wife, Margaret, was severely injured when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, said Kennedy's support for Sinn Fein made the award "highly improper".
Michael Ancram, who served as a junior minister in Ulster, said: "I was surprised because those who really helped in Northern Ireland, like George Mitchell, made it clear they worked for both parts of the community whereas Ted Kennedy visibly supported one part - the Republican movement."
At least the detractors will not have to address the Senator as 'Sir Ted': the title is not permitted for foreign recipients, though he will be allocated the initials KBE - Knight of the British Empire - after his name.
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