IN HARMONY with their European partners for once, it seems British voters too would relish the opportunity to back Barack Obama. A recent international survey suggests they would do so by a massive margin (64 per cent to 15 per cent) in a spectacularly bipartisan embrace of the "change" promised by the Democratic candidate, writes Frank MillarLondon Editor.
It was all very different eight years ago. John Major and Bill Clinton had each enraged the other (remember the controversies over the trawl for dirt in Clinton's Oxford University records, the Gerry Adams visa at a fraught moment in the Irish peace process). With the "Third Way" New Labour/New Democrats in the ascendant, the Tories under Major's successor William Jefferson Hague likewise felt little warmth or affinity for Al Gore.
Though officially neutral on the other hand, the Blairite establishment thought Gore robbed by the "hanging chads" of Florida and was as scandalised as the old left by the arrival of "the Texan cowboy".
That was before President Bush found in Tony Blair a fellow Christian soldier, an enthusiast for a muscular foreign policy promising the spread of democracy, his most dependable ally in the post-9/11 "war on terror".
And long before the late Robin Cook lamented that a different result in Florida would probably have spared Britain the need to commit troops to action in Iraq.
Disillusion about the war and its aftermath - not to mention Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition - undoubtedly informs the current enthusiasm for an Obama presidency. There never was a British love affair with "Dubya". Yet it should be remembered Blair won his third election victory despite Iraq. With the Republican "pre-mortem" already under way, it is at least interesting to consider if British attitudes to the presidential contest might have been different with Blair still at the helm.
For all the talk of a more distant relationship with Mr Bush, prime minister Gordon Brown has not changed British foreign policy.
Yet the impression persists that Brown is impatient to be out of Iraq and probably hankers for a new era of UN resolutions and "international consensus". While weekly reporting the latest fatalities to the House of Commons, moreover, many feel his Labour government is failing to provide a credible and sustained narrative explaining an ever-deepening British military engagement in Afghanistan.
In such circumstances it is hardly surprising to find a British Conservative leadership likewise apparently comfortable with the change proffered by the Democratic contender, whatever it might actually mean for policies previously deemed vital to the security interests of the United States and the United Kingdom.
The scale of this turnaround was underlined earlier this week when Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome.com, was prompted to seek space to make the case for a McCain presidency following the appearance of three articles endorsing Obama in The Daily Telegraph. The most eye-catching was from London mayor Boris Johnson who, while paying tribute to the "brave and principled" McCain, found in Obama the incarnation of change and hope he believed America needs.
"It is not clear how America under McCain would recover her standing in the world," wrote Johnson. "Obama deserves to win because he seems talented, compassionate, and because he offers the hope of rejuvenating the greatest country on Earth in the eyes of the rest of us."
David Cameron invited John McCain to address the Tory conference two years ago, a fact that will stand him in good stead should the Republican produce one of the greatest electoral upsets of all time.
Yet all politics, as they say, is about the next election, and Cameron has hardly failed to detect that in the American battle between "experience" and "change", it is the young, cool, charismatic candidate for change who excites and inspires.
Assuming the Democrat wins, we can expect echoes of this when Cameron finally gets his chance to run against the experienced incumbent in Number 10.
As in America, so in Britain, of course, we will only know what the change means when it happens. One thing that need not be assumed, however, is the end of "the special relationship". Still determinedly "friendly", in that respect at least British voters still buck the European trend.