A fun game for football fans involves trying to recall players who were earmarked as future Premier League stars and fell hilariously short. There was a balletic Manchester City midfielder - I can't remember his name - who was slated as a future England captain, only to be photographed by fans eating a takeaway a few years later, bloated and out of work. You can play the same game with this year's presidential election.
Diplomats posted to the US make it their business to work out which big beasts of American politics are most likely to become president years in the future, like football pundits predicting England teams but with slightly more riding on it. They call it 'talent spotting.' And the word on the street is that when the oracles appointed by the British government looked at the post-Romney field a few years ago, they decided to get close to New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
Talent spotting is political gambling where utterly needless meetings with royals and the Prime Minister are the stakes. When the target doesn’t become president - say, when he drops out of the race for the nomination after two contests, polling so few votes in New Hampshire that he isn’t eligible to appear in the next TV debate - the talent-spotting can be declared a waste of everyone’s efforts. That includes the valuable stateside holiday time of Prince Harry.
During the prince's six-day tour of the US in 2013, he spent a day in New Jersey, touring the state’s storm-damaged coastline with the portly Christie as his guide. This was a generous royal gift even for a politician brought up in the clientelist politics of New Jersey. The governor was the highest profile official on the royal itinerary, which marked the peak of Christie’s reputation. His response to the disaster had won him such celebrity that when his team had to think up a gift for Harry, they decided on a fleece, a trimmer copy of the one Christie had worn at the post-Sandy press conferences.
By 2014, the British government doubled down on their bet. Despite now being implicated in a national political scandal, accused of intentionally gnarling traffic on the George Washington Bridge in order to punish a mayor who had refused to endorse him, Christie was invited to the UK - on what was described as a 'trade mission' on behalf of his state. Unlike other Republican hopefuls touring Europe, like Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, Texas governor Rick Perry or Florida senator Marco Rubio, Christie was granted a Number 10 meeting with David Cameron and a lunch with George Osborne.
The trip in February of last year was declared an 'utter failure'. It began with Christie visiting the Globe Theatre for a rehearsal of Henry V but descended into shambles when the governor made a remark about parents deciding on the wisdom of having their children vaccinated. As the presidential historian Douglas Brinkley put it, 'He came across like a bull carrying his own china shop with him.'
Christie’s primary run was also an utter failure. The man who the finest minds of the FCO predicted for the White House couldn’t drag his sorry campaign to Super Tuesday. Somehow, the humiliations mounted. Christie backed Trump, assuming a role as his 'manservant'. A Snapchat video was said to show the all-powerful governor of New Jersey picking up Trump’s food from McDonald’s. When the nominee picked Mike Pence as his running mate, Christie reportedly begged Trump to change his mind.
Last month, the New York Times reported 'an undercurrent of quiet desperation' among European foreign policy officials visiting the US conventions. The paper noted that the diplomats had expected a more traditional Republican to win the nomination - one for whom Nato obligations and a deep suspicion of Vladimir Putin’s motives aren’t up for debate.
More widely, the class of insiders who didn’t see Brexit coming - who didn’t detect post-crash society's crescendoing forces of conspiracy and despair - also didn’t know of the people in America who wanted their country back. The insiders thought the extremisms flagged up by the Tea Party years were over because Republican electoral arithmetic required them to be. From the vantage point of well-educated visitors to Washington DC and New York, American conservatism was headed Chris Christie’s way. And yet here we are.
Joshi Herrmann is editor-in-chief of The Tab. His previous writing for The Spectator can be found here.