I remember as a child hearing my parents talk about Americans. They had both been in uniform during the Second World War. They had come into close contact with the US military. The experience left them strikingly ambivalent about Americans. I heard them describe GIs – American infantry – as ‘Russians with creases in their trousers’. This referred to the fearsome reputation for brutality that the Red Army had acquired as it advanced through Europe.

After the war, my stepfather commanded the RAF station at Duxford, just outside Cambridge. Battle of Britain day was always marked by a public aerobatics display, first by venerable British Meteor jets and then by the ultra-modern, swept-wing American Super Sabers from one of the nearby US Air Force bases. The aerobatic style was very different. The Meteors were slow-moving and balletic as they wheeled and swooped in the summer sky. The Americans announced themselves by hurtling towards us low and loud from over the horizon.

Watch The West Wing and, say, The Thick of It or Yes, Minister – and marvel at American reverance and British cynicsm in the representation of our political leaders

I jumped up and down with excitement. But there was much sucking of teeth by my parents and their friends about the flashiness of Americans and their preference for show and brute force over skill. Fifty years later, not a lot has changed in British attitudes: Meteors v. Super Sabers; British Greeks versus American Romans; softly, softly in Basra versus surge in Baghdad; and even small, sweet, curly Caribbean bananas, favoured by Europeans, versus large, straight, coarse bananas from US plantations in Latin America, the antagonists in the ludicrous banana trade war of the late Nineties between Europe and America.