Sunday Times 2
Britain’s elephant: hubris, dependency, and the comfort of ambiguity
View(s):By Dr Ruben Thurairajah
In 1951, the Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer published a slight novel with a large title: Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu — My Granddad Had an Elephant! The story concerns a family whose past wealth and status are symbolised by an elephant that once stood in their courtyard. The animal is long gone. What remains is memory, endlessly recited. The matriarch repeats the tale to children, neighbours, visitors, as though the act of narration itself might restore what time has taken away. Basheer’s humour is gentle, but his insight is unsparing. When power disappears, memory does not merely console; it becomes a performance.
Britain, in the early twenty-first century, lives with a similar elephant. It calls its relationship with the United States the “special relationship”. The phrase is spoken by prime ministers with ritual seriousness, invoked at moments of uncertainty, displayed during crises as reassurance. It suggests intimacy, equality, shared purpose. Yet it functions less as a description of reality than as a coping mechanism; a language designed to manage decline without naming it.
From empire to adjustment
The decisive moment came in 1956, during the Suez crisis. Britain attempted to assert imperial authority by force, colluding with France and Israel to reclaim the canal from Egypt. The effort collapsed under American opposition. Sterling pound wavered; Britain withdrew. It was a clean revelation. Strategic power had passed elsewhere. The empire was no longer enforceable.
Yet Britain did not respond with clarity. Instead, it adjusted. Subordination to America was reframed as partnership. Dependence on America was softened into closeness. What could not be resisted was reinterpreted as chosen alignment. The “special relationship” was not a discovery; it was an invention; an imaginative settlement with diminished circumstances.
From that point onward, Britain ceased to behave as an independent power and began to operate as a loyal auxiliary. It retained global habits of speech and ceremony, but its freedom of action narrowed. Influence was increasingly claimed not through outcomes, but through access. To be consulted became the substitute for deciding.
The persistence of theatre
Hubris, in such circumstances, does not disappear; it migrates. Britain no longer boasts of ruling territories, but it still performs importance. State visits, summits, and military symbolism acquire exaggerated significance. Recognition is treated as relevance.
The second state visit of Donald Trump in 2025, staged with full ceremonial splendour, illustrated this tendency. Windsor Castle illuminated, guards in scarlet, the monarch in uniform: the imagery was imperial, even if the power it once represented had evaporated. Trump praised the bond as eternal. Britain received the compliment as confirmation that it still mattered.
Yet moments later, in a different setting, the limits of that importance were exposed. At an international summit in Egypt, Britain’s prime minister was publicly acknowledged by the American president, invited forward, and then quietly sidelined. The gesture was polite, even friendly. Its meaning was unmistakable. Britain was present, but peripheral. The stage was shared; the script was not.
Venezuela and the language of evasion
This distance became unmistakable during the current crisis in Venezuela. When the United States conducted a unilateral military operation to seize President Nicolás Maduro an act many states and legal scholars described as a breach of sovereignty and due process the British government responded with studied restraint. It announced that Britain had not been involved. It reaffirmed its general commitment to international law. It declined to say whether international law had been violated.
The response was notable not for what it said, but for what it avoided. There was no defence of principle, no clear legal assessment, no moral judgement. Instead, there was process: fact-finding, consultations, careful phrasing. Ambiguity became the policy.
This was not confusion. It was choice.
Britain’s leaders understood that a clear condemnation would imply disagreement with Washington. They also understood that explicit endorsement would require legal justification they were unwilling to supply. The solution was silence dressed as responsibility. Evasion was presented as maturity.
Here, Britain’s hubris takes its modern form. The country still imagines itself as occupying a privileged position close to power, even as that closeness deprives it of the freedom to speak plainly. The myth of influence justifies the surrender of principle.
How this looks from the Global South
For countries such as India—and for much of the Global South—this behaviour is read differently. Sovereignty is not an abstract legal concept but a historical wound, shaped by intervention, coercion, and selective application of international norms. When a former imperial power invokes international law while declining to judge its violation by an ally, the message is not neutrality but hierarchy. Principles appear conditional; legality seems aligned with power.
India’s own diplomacy, cautious yet increasingly assertive, reflects an awareness of this asymmetry. New Delhi hedges between blocs not out of nostalgia, but out of calculation. It resists automatic alignment precisely because alignment has historically come at the cost of autonomy. Britain, by contrast, clings to alignment as reassurance. Where India seeks strategic space, Britain seeks reassurance of relevance. The contrast is instructive.
The special relationship as discipline
What was once advertised as Britain’s greatest diplomatic asset has become a constraint. The “special relationship” now functions as a disciplining mechanism. It shapes what Britain can say, which violations it can acknowledge, and when it must hesitate. Loyalty is not rewarded with leverage; it is rewarded with expectation—the expectation of restraint.
This pattern is familiar. In Iraq, Britain joined an American war on the assumption that participation conferred influence. It did not. In the aftermath of Brexit, Britain spoke of regained sovereignty while discovering that economic and strategic dependence had merely shifted forms. In Venezuela, Britain finds itself unable even to name an act of force for what it was.
The empty courtyard
Basheer’s novel ends without drama. The elephant does not return. The courtyard remains orderly, swept, empty. The recognition is quiet and devastating.
Britain stands before a similar truth. The empire is gone. Strategic autonomy is limited. Influence must be earned, not assumed. Yet the recital continues. The “special relationship” is invoked as reassurance, a familiar phrase to ward off uncertainty.
The danger lies not in nostalgia, but in mistaking nostalgia for strategy. Britain’s moral and legal evasions over Venezuela are not anomalies; they are symptoms of a deeper condition. A country that once commanded is now adjusting, but without fully acknowledging the terms of its adjustment.
Until Britain confronts this reality—until it learns to speak with clarity rather than caution—it will continue to live with its elephant. The memory will endure. The power will not.