From Winston Churchill to Tony Blair, every post-war prime minister has been consumed by a foreign policy that has boiled down to the choice between Europe and the United States while trying to establish an independent British role in the world.

Although Britain emerged as an allied victor from the ashes of World War II, some say she won the war, but lost the peace.

Her vast imperial empire had disintegrated, and the "special relationship" with the United States, a partnership forged by a common heritage and the war, went through rough patches after the Suez Crisis in 1956.