Toby Harnden was fortunate enough to be invited – alongside such luminaries as Denis Kucinich and Steny Hoyer – to the British embassy garden party thrown for Her Majesty’s visit yesterday afternoon. He therefore heard Her Majesty sum up the essence of the Alliance more pithily than I’ve heard it anywhere else:

Divided, all alone, we can be vulnerable. But if the Atlantic unites, not divides us, ours is a partnership always to be reckoned with in the defense of freedom and the spread of prosperity. That is the lesson of my lifetime. Administrations in your country, and governments in mine, may come and go. But talk we will; listen we have to; disagree from time to time we may; but united we must always remain.

Quite.