True, 43 out of 44 American presidents claim at least a drop of royal blood, as do more than 150 million ordinary Americans. The eighth president, Martin van Buren, was the only exception. Being Dutch, he was also an outsider like the envious Turk who is London's mayor. Obama has another advantage that Johnson's flaxen mop denies him. Black has been beautiful for Britain's royal family ever since Queen Victoria fancied herself Kaiser-i-Hind. Her son followed her astute lead. When Kaiser Billy, then German crown prince, grumbled at yielding precedence to King Kalakaua of Hawaii at a dinner in London, Edward VII retorted, "Either the brute is a king or else he is an ordinary black nigger, and if he's not a king, why is he here at all?"
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Victoria was not amused when the Marquess of Salisbury dismissed Dadabhai Naoroji as a black. Her great-great-granddaughter's displeasure can be imagined at Noël Coward's reply when someone asked who the South-East Asian potentate sitting opposite the enormously large, popular and beaming Queen Salote of Tonga in her coronation procession was. "Her lunch," Coward replied. Queen Elizabeth's uncle, Edward VIII, found "coloured" West Indians "revolting" and wanted to hobnob with the Aryan Nazis. They bundled him off the throne instead and whisked him away as governor to the Bahamas where no coloured person entered government house by the front door during his stint.
Brooks-Baker says that being even remotely royal impresses Americans. It's the one thing they can't buy. Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale because he was royal. John F Kennedy trounced Richard Nixon, who tried to make up for being less royal by trying to get his daughter married to Prince Charles. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both royal and cousins to boot. But it isn't enough in Britain to be descended from King Alfred. There has to be something else too.
Johnson thought that something else was Obama's unsuspected slave antecedents. So, when the online resource, Ancestry, discovered that through his white mother, the 44th president is also the 11th great-grandson of the first documented African slave in American history, Johnson, not to be outdone, quickly produced his own slave forebear. "I want you to know that my great-great-grandmother was a slave," he boasted. "She was a Circassian slave, and she was sold: my great-great-grandfather literally purchased her." But there was no proof his paternal great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, a Turkish journalist and politician with an Anglo-Saxon wife whose maiden name was Johnson, really was the son of a Circassian slave.
For that matter, while Obama's slave ancestor might be historically correct, it does help conveniently to divert attention from more embarrassing disclosures. Those who regard the president as a race-baiter were delighted to broadcast that his maternal great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Washington Overall, owned two black slaves. So did his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Duvall. There's nothing for a politician like being simultaneously on both sides of the fence.
British monarchs are kings (or queens) for all seasons. King George IV obligingly wore a short kilt when visiting Scotland after a court lady pleaded, "As your Majesty stays so short a time in Scotland, the more we see of you the better." King George V gamely sported a red tie when receiving his first Socialist prime minister. The Queen probably kept South Africa in the Commonwealth by making herself "Elizabeth" to Nelson Mandela whom she called "Nelson". When Michelle Obama draped an arm round Her Majesty's shoulder, the royal arm could be seen tentatively edging around the First Lady's waist. Clearly, it's worth the Queen's while to reject her uncle's anti-colour prejudice. But she can't overlook the significance of his claim, "Every drop of blood in my veins is German." Barack Obama has emerged as the most powerful, if also the most unlikely, champion of retaining Queen Elizabeth's ancestral German links through continued British membership of the European Union.