Paul Johnston

Today with David McCullough on RTE Radio 1.

Good morning, David.

I don't think there was ever any doubt.

There's enough knowledge in the British system about the history of political violence and other forms of unrest in America that all of those factors would have been played into the visit planning over many weeks and months.

So this is a last-minute shock, if you like, and they would have certainly reviewed

all the arrangements.

And I understand that a few tweaks or modifications are being made to the programme.

But I think, as you say, it's a high stakes visit and I think it would have been a very high stakes decision to cancel it at the 11th hour.

No, it's a very fraught backdrop for a state visit.

Some of the comparisons that have been made have been to 1957, when in the wake of another Anglo-American spat over the Middle East, when President Eisenhower deplored

Britain and France's illegal invasion of the Suez Canal, the boot being on the other foot now, the Queen went to Washington the following spring in an effort to sort of mend fences and build bridges and all the rest of it.

This is a slightly different visit in the sense that President Trump invited the King and Queen to visit in the run-up to the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.

So it's tied in a sense to that title.

timeline.

But you're right in terms of the relationship between the British and American governments, which is obviously a different thing between the relationship between the two countries.

But as the visible part of that relationship, the political atmosphere between London and Washington is as bad as I can remember in my professional lifetime.

I think on the Afghanistan thing, I have no evidence for this beyond what I read in the newspapers.

But if you recall, after Trump made those disgraceful comments about the European allies sort of being off the front line and not really contributing very much, I think one of the very few retractions or anything approaching an apology I can remember

was on this issue because he posted on Truth Social a few days later something about how the UK had been great allies in Afghanistan.

And I just wonder if some message was passed along some channel to say, you know, do you remember the King is, you know, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces and anything that sort of slights or insults, you know, our nation's forces gallantry is unlikely to be well received.