In London, George W. Bush’s popularity could be measured with a teaspoon, and it’s a commonly held assumption that no American living on these shores could possibly have supported his re-election. For the most part, that belief does hold up.

But it’s not watertight. Hidden throughout the capital, tucked away in the offices of the City and the townhouses of St. John’s Wood, are a few loyal Republicans. They’ve just chosen to be circumspect about it.

Following the invasion of Iraq, anti-Bush sentiment here hit such a crescendo that it would take a very thick-skinned American to broadcast personal pro-Bush beliefs. When Corre Myer, 24, a Bush supporter from Orange County, Calif., is asked where she stands, she finds herself changing the topic. “I don’t lie,” she said.

Americans quietly have fallen silent.

No matter where their loyalties lie, most Americans living in London are in a bind. England has always followed American politics closely, but aversion here to the Bush administration – and, in some cases, to America at large – seems to have reached a new height. So strong and unwavering is local antipathy that the approximately 200,000 Americans here find it hard to enter the national conversation comfortably, even those who are on the same page as the English majority. They say they find themselves with but two options: either insisting that they couldn’t agree more with their interlocutors, or begging off the conversation altogether.

In the case of Bush supporters, it’s easy to understand. Why risk a verbal scuffle when you can talk politely about gardening instead?

What’s more puzzling is that those Americans who say they can’t stand President Bush find it difficult to engage in conversations about politics for fear of saying something remotely defensive that might set off an anti-American tirade.

To be fair, many American liberals thrive in the unforgiving anti-Bush climate here and say they prefer it to the one they left behind.

A 26-year-old financier, Richard (you’ll soon see why he asked that his last name not be used), grew up on the Upper West Side and has been splitting his time between here and New York for the past few years. He described his political stance as conservative and said that in years past people here were “very welcoming” of his opinions. At present, though, he’s made a pact with himself never to enter a political conversation. “I just nod and smile and say, ‘I’m sorry but I’m not going to go there,'” he said over a pint at a South Kensington pub.

Still, avoiding conversation is no mean feat. Many Americans here said they feel that English people see them as spokesmen for America. The natives want answers, even mini-lectures. Like residents of many blue states, they can’t fathom how Bush won again. Unlike the blue-staters, however, they don’t have the Republican neighbors and co-workers, and the occasional columnist in a newspaper or sage on a cable-television network, to talk them through it.

“They just want an explanation,” Richard’s drinking partner Elin Richards, a banker who originally comes from Boston, said. Ms. Richards does what she can to avoid such conversations, even though she voted for John Kerry.

“It’s so hard to be an international apologist,” a Brooklyn-born Democrat, Deirdre Kenny, said.

“I feel the need to defend America all of the time,” Ms. Kenny, 40, who works as a headhunter, said. “There’s a lot of criticism about everything from our culture and our values to our voting system. It’s easy to criticize other people.”

Part of the public fascination stems from the rabid news coverage. A liberal newspaper, the Guardian, went so far as to initiate a letter-writing campaign intended to sway undecided voters in Ohio, as you may have read. On election night, when pubs held election-watching parties, one of the BBC channels was devoted to election coverage, complete with an anchor walking over a computer-generated map of America and parsing the Electoral College system. If that doesn’t strike you as bizarre, try imagining a 12-hour marathon on NBC devoted to breathless coverage of the British parliamentary elections.

As soon as Mr. Bush’s re-election was declared, the papers had a field day. The front page of one of the national tabloids, the Daily Mirror, asked, “How could 59,054,087 people be so stupid?” The slightly more respectable Independent ran photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib and of dead Iraqi civilians.

“I’m always surprised by how much they care,” Ralph Acosta, a financial analyst who came here from Los Angeles, said. “There would never be a news program in America about how Tony Blair was re-elected.”

Mirroring the rise in civilian interest in politics stateside, the expatriate community here has undergone a political awakening. If being away from home formerly served as an acceptable excuse for slackened engagement, that’s no longer the case. The England-based international press officer of Democrats Abroad, Sharon Mannita, said membership has more than doubled in the past four years. “I think Americans overseas are more patriotic than people at home,” she said. “We don’t like sweeping criticisms of America in the media. We still love out country and we’re very protective of it.”

When another expat, Riki Evans, founded the East Anglia American Club three years ago, she said the 60 families would come together to talk casually about quaint elements of English culture, like how cars go down the left side of the road and how gas is referred to as “petrol.” These days, the primary topic of conversation is American politics, including how some Brits accuse America of being responsible for dragging England into war. “It’s an uncomfortable feeling,” Ms. Evans said.

Some Americans have managed to avoid the awkwardness. A management consultant from Southern California, Carolyn Edwards, is a Republican and said she’s “sick and tired of the British media bashing the United States.” Only once, however, has she entered a discussion with English people about her politics, and she recalls it as being perfectly civilized and non-confrontational. She has friends and family in America who decided not to visit her because they were apprehensive about being verbally attacked, a fear she sees as unfounded. “What they’re hearing at home is not necessarily the reality,” Ms. Edwards said.”We do have a tendency to put things out there that aren’t there.”

In the past, threads of anti-Americanism in England were often thought to be attributable to bitterness at the British Empire’s prowess having been eclipsed by strengthening power from one of those colonies that got away.

Gary McDowell spent 11 years in London teaching at the University of London’s Institute of American Studies. While he said he never saw an “eruption” of anti-Americanism, he recalled “a persistent undercurrent of anti-Americanism.” Today it seems to have little to do with a passive sense of jealousy, and more to do with a very real concern that the president dragged the prime minister into the Iraq war. More than 10,000 of Her Majesty’s troops have already been deployed to Iraq, and 74 of them have been killed there.

That sits poorly with the English,whose mainstream culture is far more left-leaning than our own. Organic restaurants are omnipresent in the chic parts of town, and a ban on adverts for unhealthy food goes into effect this week. Colorful promotional posters for recycling bedeck all the main roads.The only slightly conservative trend that’s visible is the widespread wearing of red felt poppies to honor Remembrance Day, the British version of Veterans Day, and those pins are, of course, nonpartisan.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Blair’s approval ratings are steadily slipping.The right doesn’t care for him because he leads the left-wing Labor Party. And Labor members feel alienated by his efforts to privatize certain national government services and by his decision to befriend Mr. Bush and join him in what’s seen as his misbegotten crusade for weapons of mass destruction.

Then, too, Mr. Bush simply rubs the English public the wrong way, what with his failure to act worldly and clever, as is expected of English leaders. Cowboy boots are in vogue in shop windows, but the charms of Mr. Bush’s Texas swagger aren’t winning over the British public. Indeed, much of the anti-Americanism that surfaces here is focused on Mr. Bush, rather than on the average American. Still, the average American is often asked to explain his president’s mystique.

Even a Kerry supporter who has attended three antiwar marches in London, Rosalyn Kumar, said she finds herself coming under attack daily.”It’s the voice,” she said at a coffee shop on the Tottenham Court Road. “The minute they hear the voice, it’s all over.”

Sometimes, to avoid being sucked into another frustrating conversation,the Dallas-bred law student resorts to telling people she’s from Hong Kong and was educated at an American-style school. “I always feel like I’m holding back,” she said. “I always want to say something back, but I can’t.”

Her cousin Ann Abraham, a writer of young adult fiction who recently arrived from Dallas for a week-long vacation, interjected: “Rosalyn often calls me and says she wants to pin a Canadian flag to her backpack, but nobody’s bothered me.”

“Yeah,” Ms. Kumar said. “That’s because you’re a visitor.You’re going back.”