steepholm

Let us not forget (much as we might like to) the previous PM, the one who extolled the D-Day landings on "Obama Beach." I'd say Mr Cameron has a ways to go yet before he meets those high standards of tongue-slipperiness.

I trust the historical slip in your post title is deliberate? Hopefully,

From:

Whereas we all know it was Osama, right?

(Yes. But if it weren't I might well not admit it.)

From:

On consideration I think the Cameron slip outranks the earlier one, since it elides a whole year and a half, which included the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, during which Britain "stood alone" (if we forget the rest of the Empire, but we're talking mythology here!), and which still has a fairly central place in the national identity even of Britons of my own generation. Compared with that I'd say that misremembering a codename is relatively small beer.

From:

Absolutely! Obama for Omaha is the equivalent of an online typo that anyone might make. Cameron's statement is pure bloody ignorance. Corporal Jones must be turning in his grave. Hasn't ~~Harold Saxon~~ Smoothiechops the Insufferable even heard all those jokes about "late again"? Or heard that war referre4d to as the "42-45" war, just as the 14-18 Great War is, to some we don't mention, the 16-18?

Seething quietly....

From:

I think not. Stumbling over names is of variable levels, and that particular stumble revealed an awesome clumsiness matched only when Jimmy Carter eulogized Hubert Horatio Humphrey as "Hubert Horatio Hornblower."

I could read Cameron's "1940" as a slip for "the 1940s", which is far less awkward than the above; or as a cool acknowledgment of the fact that, US material assistance to the UK already being well under way, the junior partnership had already started; or, and I think this by far the most likely, as a way of buttering up his hosts.

The last fits in far better with the image of Cameron as slick and smarmy (see the above reference to him as "Smoothiechops") than as clumsy and stumblefooted like Brown, which is what treating it as dumb ignorance paints him as.

From:

Oh, I can well believe he is both smarmy and ignorant, certainly of history, since he wouldn't see it as a commmercial subject. And I can also believe he would be sycophantic enough to suck up to his hosts by misrepresenting history. I don't see how anyone could say "1940" and mean "the 1940s" though. I think he simply wasn't aware of the history.

From:

The Daily Mash puts it in historical perspective.

From:

I don't see how anyone could say "1940" and mean "the 1940s" though.

Same way one could say "Obama Beach" and mean "Omaha Beach" or "Hubert Horatio Hornblower" and mean "Hubert Horatio Humphrey."

From:

If 1940 were just any old date, then I'd agree - but it's got an iconic status that makes a mistake with reference to it more than just a mistake. It's rather as if Obama had referred "to the terrorist attacks on 912".

From:

Or even on 11/9....:)

From:

And Omaha Beach is not iconic?

And in the US, I assure you that at the time of his death Hubert Humphrey was also pretty damned iconic.

From:

Not as iconic in Britain, no - though D-Day as a whole certainly would be. Omaha was an American beach, iirc: it might well have been an equivalently-bad slip had an American politician made it. Even as it was, it was a first-class goof, I'll happily admit. But Cameron not only got it wrong, he took a date synonymous with Britain's "standing alone" and used it as an exemplum of Britain's being a junior partner. Coming from a British Prime Minister, that's about as bad as it gets.

From:

I understand the profound awfulness of this. But I continue to believe it was a crude and egregious attempt to flatter his hosts, rather than a clumsy stumbling over his own tongue - a Brown thing to do rather than a Cameron thing - and surely not an actual case of forgetting or of not knowing. That last would require intelligence on a Sarah Palin level, and I doubt you have politicians of such aggressive ignorance in Britain.

From:

papersky.livejournal.com

Over two years. September 1939-December 1941 is two years and 2 months.

If you count from the fall of France in May 1940, then yes, a year and a half.

I've run into US ignorance about this before -- write alternate history if you want to find out how much history people don't know -- but I'd have thought British people knew it.

What do they teach them in Eton!

From:

I was thinking specifically of the "standing alone" period - but either way, Cameron was way off!

From: