With only ten years to go until the much-anticipated 400th-anniversary celebrations of the Pilgrim Fathers, it is no wonder Prime Minister Barack Obama spent much of this week locked in planning meetings with Buckingham Palace.
Whether the Whig-Labour coalition will still be going in 2020 is a moot point. Some even wonder whether the United Kingdom of Great Britain and North America will still exist at all. More and more, it seems, critics look back to the failed rebellion of the late 1770s and wonder what might have been.

That so few schoolchildren today learn the details of those tumultuous years - the American opposition to colonial taxation, the great British victory at Yorktown and the death of the rebel leader General Washington - is a national disgrace. Had the transatlantic empire broken up, Britain would surely have been condemned to obscurity, even if it is hard to imagine the American states remaining united for long. Yorktown should be remembered as one of our pivotal victories, ushering in two centuries of international dominance.

With imperial unity preserved, the American colonies embarked on an extraordinary period of economic growth. And once given representation in parliament under the Treaty of London, they began punching their weight: by the 1860s, American politicians such as Gladstone's Whig
deputy Abraham Lincoln were well-known figures on the streets of London. Soon enough the United Kingdom even had its first American prime minister: Theodore Roosevelt succeeded his friend Lord Salisbury in 1902, but then led the Tories to one of the worst defeats in their history against Campbell-Bannerman's Whigs in 1906.

Roosevelt's defeat, however, could not mask the way the centre of gravity had moved westwards. By the 1920s, the royal family was spending more and more time in its North American capital city, Georgetown, and the long reign of Edward VIII and Queen Wallis marked a decisive shift. With California and Texas added to the empire after victory over the Mexicans in the Second World War, British affairs were increasingly forgotten. Few people noticed when Enoch Powell's new Independent Republican Party picked up a few English seats in 1964; most were absorbed by the battle between Richard Nixon's Tories and the Trudeau-Callaghan Whig-Lab Alliance.

But it is becoming increasingly difficult to paper over the cracks. The Republicans played a key role in the last election; their charismatic leader, Iain Duncan Smith, comfortably outshone Barack Obama and Stephen Harper in this year's prime ministerial debates. If support for them keeps growing, Britain might not be commemorating the Pilgrim Fathers in 2020, but celebrating its rebirth as an independent republic.