PM under pressure as Gaddafi forces approach east Libya

The Prime Minister has a list of phone calls to make on Libya in the next 48 hours but he makes them knowing that Saif Gaddafi is saying Libya will be fully in his father’s control within 48 hours.

David Cameron’s phone list includes Arab countries he wants to pledge military aircraft to the No Fly Zone plan. Other countries on the list will also be asked for pledges of physical and moral support.

The list also includes President Obama. Number 10 senses that the US administration might just be movable if it thought that a good enough range of countries was backing No Fly Zones. But it’s striking that the President and the PM haven’t spoken to each other in over a week.

It’s hard to imagine that the White House enormously enjoys watching the PM and President Sarkozy getting the kudos of leading the calls for outside military involvement in Libya in the knowledge that any sort of fully-fledged NFZ (estimated to need 150+ military aircraft) will need the US and big time (the area that would need patrolling would be 2 or 3 times bigger than the Northern Iraq NFZ that was monitored by a constant cycle of 20 to 30 aircraft).

There are suggestions that figures in the US administration think David Cameron is grandstanding over Libya (the very word used by government sources only a few weeks ago when they were disparaging President Sarkozy’s early demands for action against Col Gaddafi).

The Prime Minister’s call in the Commons just now for “leadership” risks being interpreted as a call on the US to show “leadership.” Tony Blair tried that with his best buddy President Clinton over Kosovo and put his relationship under “colossal strain,” as he says in his memoirs. David Cameron doesn’t have anything like a comparably strong relationship with the US President but you have to suspect that things are more than a little strained right now.

David Cameron said in the Commons that No Fly Zones are not a “simple solution” on their own and that’s certainly true given the ground action that would carry on even if they were imposed.

He seemed, by the way, as unimpressed by Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s second major policy suggestion in three days (sending in the Egyptian army) as he was by the first (breaking the arms embargo, just imposed, to arm the rebels).