Greetings From The Guardian

Harold Pinter
Playwright

Dear Jorge,

Look out! Behind you!!
Hahahahahahahaha, only kidding.

Love,
DBC Pierre
Novelist

Dear George,

I must be missing something. When you were elected it felt like a bad dream. Here was the new most powerful man on the planet and his main qualification seemed to be distinguished service in his college cheerleading squad. He cared nothing about the world outside America and in his spare time he liked to send educationally subnormal kids to the electric chair. Well, I said to myself, at least we elected the kind of government who'll stand up to him. I keep pinching myself, George. I keep on doing it.

I'd really like you to answer one question. How come Tony does everything you say? You can detain British citizens without trial, break every international agreement going, and still you get to make this full state visit. George, you won't be able to see us protesting because they'll keep us out of sight, but how did you persuade him to use our taxes to help your re-election campaign? Do you have pictures of him in bed with Prince Charles? Or a goat? It has to be something like that. Please let me know.

Yours, confused
Hari Kunzru
Author

Dear Mr Bush (I'd say President Bush if you had actually been elected),

I've been asked to give advice to you on touching down in Britain. It is this. Go home. You aren't wanted here. You aren't wanted anywhere else either, but you may have been misunderinformed that Britain was the one place where you would bewelcomified. Wrong. Well, presumably your best pal Tony welcomes you. But that's about it. Your motorcades, your helicopters, your triggerhappy guards will try to protect you from the people of Britain, who would otherwise spoil the photo-ops for the folks back home. But be in no doubt. We despise you here too. After you and Jeb stole the election (by a margin smaller than the number of folks you executed in Texas) you were rightly written off as a one-term president: a fair advertisement for Drunks For Jesus but otherwise an idle nonentity; inarticulate, unintelligent, an ignorant hick. September 11 changed all that. Not that you covered yourself with glory that day. You are said to admire Churchill. Can you imagine Churchill, at such a moment, panicking all around the country from airbase to airbase? Even nasty old Rummy bunkered down where he belonged.

Never mind, your puppeteers from the Project for the New American Century recognised the opportunity they had been waiting for. September 11 was your golden Pearl Harbor. This was how you'd get elected in 2004 (not re-elected, elected). You would announce a War on Terror. American troops would win. And you would be the victorious warlord, swaggering in a flight suit before a Mission Accomplished banner.

It worked in Afghanistan. But then those puppeteers moved on to their long-term project: Iraq. Never mind that you had to lie about weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that Iraq had not the smallest connection with 9/11. The good folks back home would never know the difference between Saddam andOsama. You would ride the paranoid patriotism aroused by 9/11 all the way into Iraq, and hand out oil and reconstruction contracts to Dick Cheney's boys. That escapade is now backfiring horribly, as many of us said it would. No wonder young American travellers are sewing Canadian flags to their rucksacks. What we in Britain won't forgive is that you have dragged us down too. Go home.

Richard Dawkins
Scientist

Dear Mr President,

Today you arrive in my country for the first state visit by an American president for many decades, and I bid you welcome.

You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.

I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.

It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.

Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time.

Frederick Forsyth
Novelist

Dear President Bush,

The child who has lost his arms
thought he was catching a ball
when the bomb his enemies dropped
bounced through his dapper hall.

Look at him here in his bed
washed by the camera glare
the world must know what happened,
and show how truly it cares.

Was it in fact his foes
who threw this thing in his house?
Or was it perhaps his friends -
hence their exceptional fuss?

Guilt is the great disguiser,
blacking the white of the sun.
One thing we know for sure:
the ball goes bouncing on.

Andrew Motion
Poet laureate

George,
Great job, keep it up!

Julie Burchill
Writer

Dear George W Bush,

I'm glad you're here. It may do you some good to know how much you and your policies are reviled among many people in the nation that is your closest ally. Your visit will also embarrass Tony Blair, who badly needs embarrassing. For both reasons you are most welcome. Red carpets, closed streets, traffic jams, helicopter surveillance, gold dinner plates: these are a small price for us to pay. The Iraq war, as I think even you must be discovering, has made the world more dangerous rather than less. I still can't work out why you and Blair (and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc) thought it such a good idea. Even if we accept the arguments of your fellow citizen, Noam Chomsky, that the US will stop at nothing in its quest to be the world's unopposed exploiter and ruler, then there are surely more subtle and effective ways of reaching this end. Are you really surprised that American troops are dying every day? How many British casualties do you think a British government could stand before it called an end to our part in the occupation? You must ask Blair, if you haven't already. War is an actuarial business, and my guess is that another 50 dead Britons would have us out in a jiffy. We haven't the stomach for it.

I wonder what you think of Blair. A recent Provisional IRA codename for him was "Naive Idiot". It would be good to know if this is how he came across during his famous attempts to moderate American behaviour, in his self-appointed role as your best foreign friend.

Ask the Queen her view. She has seen a good few prime ministers and may have a hubris scale for them. My hunch is that in the categories of crazed military adventurism and good looks, she'll have him as number two after Anthony Eden. Ask about him too. There was something called Suez, which your side didn't approve of at all. That was in the days when imperialism was a dirty word on your side of the Atlantic, maybe because it applied to somebody else's empire. Ask about that. Look on this trip as an education. Yours in the cause of enlightenment and in the Christian belief that repentance is never too late,

Ian Jack
Editor, Granta

Dear George,
Welcome to Grate Britten. We haven't been introduced before, but my name is Adam of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and I'm Californian. I'm sorry that my state voted Gore, but there you go...

I'm writing because in my work as an expatriate Shakespearean vaudevillian, I spend a lot of time reading ancient Buddhist texts, and I have a suggestion for you regarding policy direction. I think you should model your administration on Asoka, Beloved of the Gods, the great Buddhist emperor of India (3rd century BC). Although he was initially warlike and bloodthirsty (think Dick Cheney with a scimitar), he converted to Buddhism and began governing according to principles of tolerance, compassion and non-violence. And even though he was totally peaceful, neighbouring countries never took advantage of him because he was so cool.

So when you get back to the US, if you could do that for me, I'd be much obliged. Also, could you send over some Oreo cookies? You can't get 'em anywhere here. Thanks.

Love,
Adam Long
Director and female impersonator, the Reduced Shakespeare Co, UK

PS: If you've got a free afternoon while you're here you should come over to my house. I've got the director's cut of Dude, Where's My Car onDVD.

PPS: The word "fanny" means something completely different over here, so don't use it in polite company.

Dear Mr Bush,
I would like to reassure you: it is not your fault. It is not your fault that when you say "jump", Tony Blair asks "off which high building?". It is not your fault that, when you claimed to exercise divine authority over world affairs, he took you seriously. I don't think you expected that any more than the rest of us did.

But, though you cannot be blamed for it, we have a problem. You exercise power over our prime minister, and he exercises power over us. You, therefore, are our supreme authority, and yet you are unaccountable to us.

We are told that we live in a democracy, in which the people are sovereign, but we can neither vote you in nor vote you out (whether or not your own citizens are permitted to do so remains to be seen). You can change our lives, but we cannot change yours.

What we can do is to shout at you, and wave our banners at you and try to impede your progress around our capital city. We will leave you unmoved, I am sure. You will explain, if you are asked to do so, that - unlike the people of Iraq under Saddam Hussein - we are free to protest if we want to. But you will not acknowledge that, as far as your authority is concerned, this is all we are free to do.

The emperor will be conducted around his new domain by his prefect, and his subjects will snarl and sneer. But it is not because we hate you, though we do hate what you have done. It is because we want you out of our lives.

Yours sincerely,
George Monbiot
Writer
George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order is published by Flamingo

Courtesy, TheGuardian, where these and more letters were published and can be found.