Jack Straw got bumped from the Foreign Office because he believes it would be "nuts" to go to war with Iran.
Bush rang Blair and asked him (queruously) what his boy Jack was on.
British Foreign Secretaries are appointed in the White House.
I hadn't seen anything about this in the media, but wondered it it had anything to do with this piece in The Scotsman where fellow MP George Pope said:
He has shown Miss Rice at first hand the strength of opinion against the war in Iraq and the division it has caused in his own back yard. When she goes back to Washington to discuss what happened about Iran, she can tell President Bush there is no way that the British can be expected to take part in view of domestic public opinion.
It has also very clearly shown Jack as a world statesman in his own right. Here was Condoleezza Rice coming to his constituency and then flying out to Baghdad with him to try to persuade the parties there to form a government. This was Jack Straw as a player on the world stage on his own, not in the shadow of Tony Blair as the Prime Minister's gopher.
That would seem calculated to annoy the belligerent pair, Bush and Blair.
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