Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Boris, Biden and the orange elephant in the room

Donald who? As Boris Johnson meets Joe Biden in Cornwall this week, the Prime Minister will hope that the President doesn’t dwell on his efforts to woo the last occupant of the Oval Office. Boris’s dalliance with Donald Trump is a bit like his affair with Jennifer Arcuri — an embarrassing fling with a rotund, brash American conspiracy theorist, something he’d rather the world forgot. He’s moved on and so should we.

Boris wouldn’t, for instance, want Biden to be reminded of the time in November 2017 when, as foreign secretary, he went on Fox News to say of Trump: ‘What you’ve got to realise is that the American President is just one of the huge, great global brands… He is penetrating corners of the global consciousness that I think few other presidents have ever done.’ Slurp.

The good news for ‘global Britain’ is that Biden doesn’t remember much. This week’s G7 meeting is the Commander-in-Chief’s first overseas trip. He has several decades of experience in foreign affairs, but he is 78. There’s a whiff of anxiety in Washington circles as to whether he’ll be up to all those photo-ops, press conferences and mentally gruelling discussions with other world leaders.

So far this month, the President’s schedule has been lighter than usual (the amount of time he spends resting is already a running joke among crueller right-wing commentators). The speculation is that he’s saving his energies ahead of his transatlantic escapade. Nobody is expecting the new President to be a terrifyingly switched-on interlocutor.

The bad news is that Team Biden, in as much as it thinks about Boris Johnson, Brexit or Britain at all, is somewhat hostile. ‘They can recall Boris’s attempts to toady up to Trump,’ says Jeremy Shapiro, an American research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

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