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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Catherine Bennett

Still uncertain about Trump? Let Boris Johnson guide you on this ‘very compassionate man’

Boris Johnson, seated, with hands clasped on his lap.
‘Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action’: Boris Johnson, pictured at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 24 February 2025. Photograph: Bo Amstrup/EPA

Short of emigration, what is the best option for Britain’s dazzled Trump followers now their hero confirms he is not Europe’s ally but Vladimir Putin’s? That’s assuming what we can’t in the case of Nigel Farage MP: that they do not share the US president’s well-documented weakness for a genocidal invader. Even his more respectable British acolytes have until recently finessed, quite successfully, their love of Trump with his long history of Putin-pleasing. No one more so than Boris Johnson, former prime minister, self-styled saviour of Ukraine and still Trump’s most dependable British idiot.

To Johnson’s way of thinking, detailed in numerous Daily Mail columns, it is Trump-doubters who are always the ridiculous, panicking, hysterical, whingeing headless chickens. When Trump looked likely to win the US election, Johnson likened the reaction of the “western liberal intelligentsia” to “the shriek of elderly beldames leaping on the piano stool after spying a mouse in their petticoats”. The virile Johnson was more than willing to forget that business at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

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