Boris Johnson’s supporters will always tell you he is hugely popular in the US, so the spectacle of the former British prime minister addressing a ballroomful of empty chairs at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee is hideously poignant. Politically speaking, it is obviously even worse than when Cheryl got binned off the US X Factor. The idea of one or other of The Anecdotes falling with no one to hear it … well, Johnson was not so much casting his pearls before swine as spaffing them all over an empty pigsty.
But the erstwhile PM was not alone. I mean, he was virtually alone in the ballroom – but he had a peer group out there in Milwaukee. Liz Truss, Nigel Farage, Russell Brand – it’s almost as if the US election will be fought more edifyingly than the contest to be the most desperate Brit at the RNC. Nothing says “our empire ended several decades ago” like the scramble to get in on the end of theirs.
The prize on offer, I read, is the chance to fill the role of “Trump whisperer”, a sort of unofficial backchannel position that I assume is officially located in the presidential backchannel. From those proctological premises, the Trump whisperer is meant to persuade the notional once-and-future president that things he doesn’t give a shit about are actually quite important, if not to him, then definitely to little ol’ Britain. Anyway: let’s see how they all got on.
Johnson turning into a pumpkin while still in the ballroom was clearly a lowlight, though he did manage to post a picture of him and Trump doing a thumbs-up in a hotel suite, albeit with a sad kitchenette visible in the background. The grinning Johnson looks like someone who has just managed to persuade a man with a famous complex about his hand size to pose with their respective digits front and centre. Still, one of these men could soon be operating the levers of power with those hands. And the other … couldn’t.
Also trying to break Milwaukee was Liz Truss, who addressed another deeply unattended event at which she compared Keir Starmer to Joe Biden – but added that unlike Joe Biden, Starmer “can actually utter a coherent sentence”. High praise indeed from her. “I’ve learned how powerful the unelected bureaucracy is,” Truss said. “You have to win in November … you have to dismantle the leftist state … they are devious, they are ruthless and they are out to get you.”
Other than that intriguing account of her implosion, all Liz could muster was a handshake photo with JD Vance. I love this type of picture, which fails to clear even the “can I just grab you?” desperation of a selfie. Consider the mechanics. In order to get the snap, one of Liz Truss’s aides has had to wait and – on pain of a bollocking later – capture the fleeting moment the vice-presidential pick shakes her hand in a line-up. Which is presumably why not simply Vance, but also Truss, are out of focus. Give the aide a break! They only had half a second or something, and from this momentarily blurred encounter the impression of some kind of bilateral must be spun. Truss’s lips are smilingly pursed, which is better than them releasing sounds along the lines of “You may remember me from the best 49 days of 2022? Would you like me to show you how to crash the markets and get your entire legislative programme forcibly removed from your hands in about two weeks? OK, got it. Great to connect!”
Best fancied in the whisperer stakes is, of course, Nigel Farage, who tore himself away from the grievances of his recently acquired Clacton constituents to support his close, close friend Donald Trump. A picture of them together has confusingly yet to appear, thought it only took a few questions into an Emily Maitlis interview before Nigel was insisting hotly: “I have friends. I don’t know whether you do or not. Maybe you don’t, But I have friends.” Yeah no, definitely.
Russell Brand did manage to get a photo with a third-tier Trump (Eric), and appeared to be basking in the glow of his recent baptism by Bear Grylls, even if he is still facing numerous suggestions of sexual impropriety. Then again this is the RNC so – who isn’t? Facing allegations of sexual impropriety, I mean – not basking in the recent glow of baptism by the chief scout.
All in all, Anglo-American relations seem torn between realpolitik and unrealpolitik . The newly installed foreign secretary, David Lammy, once blasted Theresa May for “selling out the UK” for allowing Trump a state visit, but now says “we will work with whomever the United States choose to put in the White House and become their next president”. Mm-hm. By Lammy’s own standards – and who else’s to judge him on? – some sort of selling-out does seem to have occurred. Either that, or life is more complicated than his tirelessly crafted social media persona would have had us believe.
If that is something Lammy has discovered since taking office, perhaps he must enlighten the rest of Westminster. Because this side of the pond’s amusing-spectacle-of-the-week was surely UK politicians wetting their pants over a JD Vance joke about the UK being the first Islamist country with the bomb. The comment was clearly not to the collective taste, but, guys – our foreign secretary once called Donald Trump “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”. If you are going to dish it out, it’s probably better if you learn to take it. Sorry if that’s confusing, but no doubt it’ll get much less so as the next few years unfold.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
