Earthy, Highly Sexed, And Not The Britain I Expected

British bookstores are daunting places for a North American writer. In the prime spots near the cash register stand great piles of books with titles such as Why Do People Hate America?, Stupid White Men, and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. When the British public want to read about the United States, it seems, they want to read about a rapacious country governed by a moronic president - ominous news indeed for the author of a positive assessment of the George Bush presidency. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, customers are queueing up to buy coffee-table books about Cotswold cottages and defiantly unapologetic histories of the British Empire.

The simplest explanation of these transatlantic differences is that we love you - but you don't love us back. I'm not sure, though, that this explanation quite gets to the truth of the matter. I very much doubt that it placates readers of Why Do People Hate America? to hear that Americans love Winston Churchill, the reconstructed Globe Theatre and English country houses.

And possibly they are right not to be placated. If the accusation against America is that Americans are too full of themselves to pay attention to anybody else, we hardly mitigate the offence by paying attention to a Britain that has ceased to exist - or maybe never existed in the first place. If Americans truly cared about Britain, surely they would want to understand Britain as it really is.

So when The Times invited me to comment on what I saw in the course of a British book tour, I eagerly accepted. After all, if North Americans could liberate themselves from their Merchant Ivory stereotypes of Britain, we'd be better positioned to urge British people to rise above the equally false images of America purveyed over here.

The first and most deeply held stereotype of Britain among Americans is that of the twitchy, embarrassed, repressed Englishman and the frosty, sexless Englishwoman, both of them crushing all authentic feeling under the deadly obligations of good manners: Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Polly Radlett of Love in a Cold Climate. The truth is, though, that you are more likely to meet these stereotypes in Boston than in Bolton.

In comparison to the reserved, laconic, decorous and relatively puritanical political culture of the US, British politicians are an amazingly unrestrained, uninhibited and chatty bunch. A Washingtonian arrived in Westminster tends to feel like an Edwardian missionary newly arrived on some lush tropical isle.

Compared with Edwina Currie, for example, Monica Lewinsky was a model of tact and decorum. Compared with George Galloway's alleged half-million-dollar take, Whitewater looks like pitifully small beer. Compared with the howling and booing of the House of Commons, debates in the US Senate and even the House of Representatives read as if they could be chiselled in Latin on a marble wall. And compared to the late Alan Clark - well, we have nothing to Alan Clark.

And all of this is considered perfectly normal, harmlessly entertaining! In fact, on the rare occasions when a British politician exercises some elementary self-discipline, the press and the public alike protest his "spin" and "manipulation."

Nor do the politicians seem entirely unrepresentative of the country they serve.

After reading the British press, one suddenly realises how much polite self-censorship North Americans engage in. A small example: a few days ago I saw in one of the British papers a heart-warming photograph of a serviceman returning from Iraq to meet for the first time his new baby. The caption explained that the serviceman's "fiancee" had just given birth. Almost one-third of American babies are born out of wedlock - but it suddenly struck me that I had never seen a similar caption in an American paper. The photo editor would simply assume that the couple in the picture would not wish to publicise that their baby was born before they could get married - and so, out of ordinary courtesy, the editor would write a caption that sidestepped the relationship between the baby's parents, like so: "Mom Betty Smith presents Sgt George Jones with the couple's new baby, Jimmy, age three weeks."

The British like to scoff at American political correctness, and indeed by British standards, American public life must seem choked by taboos: against smoking, against cursing, against ethnic jokes. By American standards, in turn, the British seem almost shockingly earthy. At lunch in a fancy restaurant, a friend watched as a British woman pulled her baby on to the lunch table and changed its diaper in full view. You will sometimes catch a glimpse of a drunken New Yorker urinating in a dark alley; Londoners unembarrassedly relieve themselves against the brightly lit walls of the Centre Point building and then zip themselves up to run and catch the bus.

American visitors to Britain used to be affronted or delighted (according to their own status and ideology) by the class-conscious traditionalism of the old island.

Henry James complained that the United States had no established church, no court, no ancient universities, nothing for a novelist to sink his teeth into - and exulted that Great Britain had them all. But despite the wigs on the lawyers and the tailcoats on the doormen of the hotels on Park Lane, there's much more institutional continuity in the United States than in modern Britain: we still have counties and juries, gallons and local militias, search warrants and autonomous local governments. Our Capitol is 30 years older than your Parliament buildings; the facade of the White House is more than 100 years older than the front of Buckingham Palace. As for the feudal spirit, you are much likelier to find it in the valet parking lots of Los Angeles than in any British doorman, no matter what absurd costume management has forced on him.

The young Henry Adams served in the US Embassy in London in the early 1860s, and complained in a letter home that the British refused to acquire any new friends after the age of 11. That was old Britain. Today, judging by what my twentysomething friends tell me, it's probably easier to make friends in London than in New York City - and almost certainly much easier for young men in pursuit of young women to make, um, good friends. The old British obsession with privacy seems to have been transcended for good. On the trains and buses, they happily shout the most intimate sexual and medical details into their mobile phones for all to hear.

There are closed-circuit television cameras everywhere, and few seem to mind. The new congestion charge has been set up in such a way that it also functions to keep track of which motorists enter Central London at which hours. When I pointed out to the policy wonk who explained the system to me that it would have been no more trouble to enforce the charge while preserving the anonymity of the motorist (by, for example, selling motorists bar-coded stickers that could be scanned and debited by laser as the car passed by), he looked at me as if I were some pedant trying to enforce some ancient grammatical distinction. "Why bother?" he asked. If we ever want to try it in the US, I said, we'd better bother - we'd have red revolution on our hands otherwise.

Don't misunderstand: I love Britain and I love the British - and I love them just the way they are: blunt, expressive, emotional, highly sexed, indifferent to rules and protocol. I love their informality of dress and their preoccupation with good food and fine wine. I only wish the British would overcome their prejudices and learn to value Americans as they are: polite, formal, stiff upper-lipped, sexually restrained, and imbued with the idealistic spirit of reform.

Perhaps we can't interest you in phototributes to American country houses, although there are some very old and pretty ones. But could we at least prevail on you to consider the possibility that the United States is not a rogue state: it is just the you that you used to be. You've left much of that old self behind, of course, and for excellent reasons I am sure. But can't you find it in yourself to pardon us for preserving the values and customs of older Britain across the ocean, just as we preserve your Gainsboroughs in the lush gardens of Pasadena and London Bridge in the deserts of Arizona? Or are you too angry at your own history to forgive us for continuing to live it?