What makes world leaders think George Bush loves nut pastries, reads poetry and plays the harp?

Alexander Chancellor: What makes world leaders think George Bush loves nut pastries, reads poetry and plays the harp?
via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk by Alexander Chancellor on 1/29/09



This week, as it is required to do by law, the US state department published a list of all the presents given by foreigners in 2007 to President George Bush. It was an enormous list, running to hundreds of items, and remarkable also for the consistently unappealing nature of the gifts. I can honestly say that I didn't covet any of them.

It might be thought surprising that foreign leaders still give the US president any presents at all, given the lack of grace with which they are received. They are accepted only on the grounds that "non-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and US government", and the donors can be sure that hardly any of them will ever reach their intended destination. For the president is allowed to keep only gifts valued at under $335 for his personal use; the rest are regarded as gifts to the people of the US, from whom the president must buy them, if he wants them, at the market price. However, ever since that first Christmas in Bethlehem, potentates have wanted to show deference to their superiors by bearing them gifts, and it seems that nothing can cure this compulsion - not even the knowledge that it is all money down the drain. Yet you might still expect rather more intelligence and imagination from the world's leaders in their choice of presents.

You would think, for example, that before deciding to give Bush a £150 box of Charbonnel et Walker chocolates, Gordon Brown would have borne in mind that the American secret service requires the destruction of all food gifts to the president. However, Brown was not alone in this. The prime minister of Qatar gave Bush a large tin of "chocolates, fruits and cookies" worth £650, and the Iraqi president gave an "assortment of nut pastries", but these, too, in the words of the state department, were "handled pursuant to secret service policy" (ie destroyed). The same sad fate befell the £3 worth of "live shamrocks" given to Bush by the then Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, on St Patrick's Day.

Bush would have been allowed to keep another of Brown's gifts - a "green, beige and red plaid lambswool blanket" - because it is worth so little; but it has ended up all the same in a government warehouse, as has a present from Tony Blair (a Wedgwood bowl inscribed with the words "Am I not a man and a brother?", the slogan of the 19th-century British anti-slavery movement). If it is difficult to imagine what either British prime minister intended with these gifts, it is even harder to guess what was in the mind of Vladimir Putin when he gave Bush a book of "English Sonnets, 16th to 19th century", which he obviously would never read, and utterly mystifying why the president of Vietnam gave him an electric harp, which he most definitely would never play.

I clearly still have a great deal to learn about the workings of international diplomacy.