Obama on Cameron: 'What a lightweight'
Thursday, 4 December 2008 9:40 AM
Barack Obama's meeting with Tory leader David Cameron in London earlier this year left the Democratic nominee "distinctly unimpressed", it has been claimed.
According to diplomatic sources Mr Obama, now the president-elect of the United States, emerged from the meeting in July with the words: "What a lightweight."
Mr Obama met Mr Cameron following brief talks with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Westminster two days after addressing 200,000 people in Berlin.
According to the Conservatives the "really positive" meeting had seen the two men discuss the "long-term underlying problems" in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East.
An informal conversation picked up by ABC News between Mr Cameron and Mr Obama in New Palace Yard revealed the Tory leader urging the Illinois senator to 'take a break'.
Mr Cameron asked: "You should be on the beach... you need to be able to keep your head together... Do you have a break at all?"
But, according to the New Statesman, it was the conversation that followed in Mr Cameron's Commons office that caused Mr Obama to make the "lightweight remark".
A source told the magazine that Mr Cameron's "anti-European diatribe" had not impressed Mr Obama.
Two days earlier the Democrat had championed internationalism in his Berlin address.
"Partnership and co-operation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our... humanity," he said.
"That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another."
Mr Obama is due to be sworn in as the next US president on January 20th.
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