Biden no lover of UK’s ‘Trump clone’ Johnson

TRACKING_____The political bromance between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump leaves Britain and its transatlantic “special relationship” exposed if Joe Biden wins next week, just as the country needs all the friends it can get.

The UK is divorcing the European Union and looking to revitalise partnerships elsewhere, but has managed to antagonise Trump’s Democratic opponent over its Brexit plans for Northern Ireland.

French President Emmanuel Macron has at times also strived to keep Trump close. But the British prime minister is more closely associated with his fellow convention-shredding populist in Washington.

“There is a lot of frantic repositioning going on at the moment here in London by this administration in Britain,” former Conservative finance minister George Osborne told CNN on Sunday.

“But I don’t think Joe Biden will feel particularly warmly toward this British government, and they’re going to have to work very hard to change that,” he said.

Last December, as Johnson closed in on a general election victory, Biden showed his disdain in describing the Conservative politician as a “physical and emotional clone” of Trump.

The president has himself praised Johnson as “Britain(‘s) Trump”, and the prime minister’s own long trail of provocative comments has come back to haunt him.

Biden was vice president to Barack Obama when Johnson, in 2016, wrote that Obama was anti-UK owing to his “part-Kenyan” heritage and “ancestral dislike of the British Empire”.

– Trump ‘with better hair’ –
That remark was highlighted recently on Twitter by Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, who sees Johnson as Trump “with better hair” and a higher IQ. Many veterans of the Obama administration are likely to populate a Biden White House.

If elected, it will be up to Biden and his team to decide whether “to litigate and punish the past or focus on the future”, according to Heather Conley, director of the Europe programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“I am comforted that populists are chameleons: they take on the hue of the political moment. I trust should vice president Biden win, Mr Johnson’s hue will change dramatically,” she told AFP.