Can you imagine? It’s movie night at 10 Downing Street, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain has the popcorn popped and is ready to break into that set of DVDs that President Obama so graciously gave him on his recent visit to Washington. Then he sees the display say ‘error’. It turns out that the DVDs that the White House deemed fit as a symbolic gift of our relationship with Great Britain were not coded for the DVD players in Europe. Does the White House have a DVD player that will inform them of their ‘error’?
For the record, Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave President Obama a pen holder carved from the timbers of the anti-slave ship HMS Gannet, whose sister ship supplied the wood used to make the Oval Office Resolute desk. The Prime Minister also gave the President a first edition biography of Churchill by Martin Gilbert. Gifts that can only be described as “priceless.”
According to the Telegraph, the White House only snickered (“sniggered” for our English readers) when asked about the mistake. Apparently it wasn’t enough that the White House made this historic diplomatic blunder, but they had to add insult to injury. Maybe when the Prime Minister of Australia visits, the President will think better and just get him a Netflix subscription.
