America has been there in the background all my life. My father was a fan; I had an American godmother. Both these stemmed from the Second World War and my father’s role in army supply, where American industry played such a large part.

I went on from there to explore army supply in the First World War and the picture cleared and I could see the commercial advantage given to the American economy. This in turn shed light on a similar situation a quarter of a century later.

We had no choice, Churchill had to bust a gut to bring America into the war and they played a key role, but then so did Russia and the countries of the British Empire. The war emptied this nation’s coffers and only days following the peace came the imperative to pay for essential imports.

The strength of America compared to Britain lost vital nuclear technology, the helicopter, pharmaceutical development, British Nylon Spinners in the US then a major part of Courtaulds.

American had since the late nineteenth century held the advantage in manufacturing: they had both the large home market and a government which bought American first. This was apparent in the early days of electricity but also machine tools and steel and much later computers and electronics.

It was the Americans who created much of the British heavy electrical industry: British Thomson Houston which combined with British Westinghouse to form Associated Electrical Industries. General Electric provided finance to firm English Electric. Brush was American.

Before the formation of ICI, American chemicals dominated in the UK. Until Glaxo, Wellcome and Beecham made their breakthrough discoveries, Americans ruled the roost in pharmaceuticals.

We can see the American influence in our shopping baskets: Proctor and Gamble, Heinz, Mars, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Gillette, Elizabeth Arden, Barbie, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and many more.

Britain became almost inextricably linked to the US in defence. We can think of the nuclear deterrent but also American aircraft.

Timothy Garton-Ash offers helpful background to the ‘special relationship’:

The explanation? History, of course. The US founding fathers grew up thinking of themselves as Englishmen. From 1776 to 1917, when the US entered the first world war, this was, as the historian Robert Saunders nicely puts it, not so much a special as a peculiar relationship. The US defined itself historically against Britain, but there was a mutual fascination. Following the brief but important military alliance in 1917-18, and the subsequent peacemaking in Paris, the US withdrew from Europe.

A special relationship really did exist between 1941, when Winston Churchill managed – with a little help from the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor – to bring the US into the war against Adolf Hitler, and 1956, when the US humiliatingly stopped Britain and France from retaking the Suez canal. The UK and the US were not equals, but this was still a real power partnership, jointly shaping Europe, if not the world.

France and Britain drew sharply contrasting conclusions from their humiliation over Suez. France, under president Charles de Gaulle, built its own independent nuclear deterrent and had already identified the goal that the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, calls European strategic autonomy.’

We now need that strategic autonomy but do we also need Palentir to link the disparate computer systems in the NHS. We have the intellectual talent to beat Palentir and the like, just look at ARM?