On this day in 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt made a joint statement that would come to be known as the Atlantic Charter – and the start of the special relationship, writes Eliot Wilson

It is a cliche that the “special relationship” is a cliche. In one form or another, though – whether with Britain as the Greeks to America’s Rome as Harold Macmillan liked to believe, or a more obviously mismatched partnership in more recent years – ties to America have mattered to the British, more than any other bilateral relationship.

What is the Atlantic Charter?

Today in 1941, in Little Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met to finalise a statement for the press. The “Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister” was rebranded “the Atlantic Charter” by The Daily Herald; Churchill’s acute ear caught the name, and he used it in his first radio broadcast the following week. And the Atlantic Charter is where it all began.

The relationship between Britain and America was born of antagonism. Next year the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but the new nation hung in the balance until Washington’s victory at Yorktown in 1781. Relations remained warily, spikily distant until the closing years of the 19th century.

Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister in May 1940. It was........

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