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“There is nothing more pathetic than a former president,” he said. John quincy adams, sixth US president. Nothing more pathetic, except perhaps “the imitation of a former president,” like theObserver, alluding to a conservative prime minister whom some have dubbed “the mini-Trump.” Continuing to impersonate the British Trump, after Trump has left the scene, argues the London Sunday newspaper, would be counterproductive: No one wants to have a loser as a model. Worse for him, Johnson loses the partner who urged him to push the Brexit accelerator to the max, break free from the shackles of the European Union and embrace an informal business relationship with the United States.
For the UK, Brexit was already a problem. The economic crisis unleashed by the Covid pandemic has made it even worse. But if you add the Biden presidency to this, the cocktail party can turn explosive. During the presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate clearly warned: if Brexit threatens peace in Ireland, the country where Biden’s family originated (and from which millions of immigrants have arrived in the United States), there will be no possibility of a pact of free trade with Great Britain.
The gravest threat to Irish peace, reached in 1998 with Washington’s mediation, would be the “no deal”, Britain’s exit from the EU without any agreement: a still possible hypothesis, a few weeks after the mandatory end of the talks. between the two parties, which must be concluded in any way within the period already set for December 31.
That is why it was said in London that Johnson would wait for the result of the US presidential elections to decide whether to approve the necessary concessions for an agreement with Brussels. For the same reason, it is now said that Downing Street will be forced to authorize a compromise at any price to reach an agreement with the EU. “No-deal Brexit and Biden in the White House would make the UK feel very isolated in the world,” warns the Financial times. The question is whether even a Brexit with an agreement will be enough to strengthen the “special relationship” between two countries “divided by the same language”, as an old joke calls them, and now also by two radically different leaderships.
Boris Johnson was quick to congratulate Biden. But in the past, the Democratic candidate has made no secret of his antipathy towards the British prime minister, considering him “a clone of Trump.” And as indicated Tommy vietor, former spokesperson for Barack Obama, the new US administration “will not forget Johnson’s racist remarks about Obama and his slavish devotion to Trump.” In trouble on all fronts, from the pandemic to Brexit, the conservative leader should abandon the image of an unscrupulous populist to recreate one in his relationships with the new tenant of the White House. The coronavirus had already made him stop wanting to joke. Now, facing Biden, the first of the European populists is naked, so to speak.
It is early to say whether Joe Biden will find himself in London, perhaps in the Labor leader Keir starmer (at the top of five points in the polls), a partner capable of opening another cycle in the West: the recipe to defeat populism, the return to seriousness and solidarity in politics. But as someone already jokes on social networks, “after a populist blonde, another could fall.” Of course, Boris Johnson’s position has suddenly become more precarious and complicated. On the other side of the Atlantic this is no longer the time for jokes.
