Boris Johnson is just pretending to be like Donald Trump

Johnson allows Trump to think of him as a protege and new friend. His performance couldn’t be less real.

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson speak to the media before a working breakfast meeting. Picture: Pool.

“We have sold 250,000 shower trays around the world,” said the British prime minister at the G7 in Biarritz this weekend, “but some kind of bureaucratic obstacle stops us selling them in the US because they’re allegedly too low.” Is it true? No idea. Seems awfully specific. Only Boris Johnson, either way, can say things like this without sounding completely bonkers. Imagine, instead, it coming from the mouth of Jeremy Corbyn. He’d just sound furious, wouldn’t he? And, thus, deranged. No twinkle. No irony. Only rage. Shower tray rage.

Similar words, true, could come from Donald Trump, but they would land very differently. “Eh?” you’d think. “He’s focusing on what, now?” For Trump, unlike Johnson, cannot hear his own voice. He has no idea how he sounds. Perhaps you saw that old video that did the rounds last week, from 2015, just after the man who would be president had claimed that the Bible was his favourite book. Did he, an interviewer asked, have any favourite verses? “The whole Bible is incredible,” he says, impatiently. “I don’t want to get into specifics.” Whereupon the interviewer, perhaps in desperation, asks him whether he favours the Old Testament or the New. Donald Trump thinks very hard. “Probably … equal?” he says.

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson speak to the media before a working breakfast meeting in Biarritz.

How has it been so readily swallowed, this idea that these two are similar people? How does it fly? “He’s the right man for the job! I’ve been saying that for a long time!” says the American, as if he didn’t know that the Brit had once described him as “betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States”, which, quite plausibly, he actually doesn’t. There they stand, these two shaggy, golden, straight-talking sasquatches, as if they were both chlorinated peas from the same chlorinated pod.

“They call him Britain’s Trump!” said the president, last month. “That’s a good thing. They like me over there. That’s what they wanted.” Now the prime minister mugs, blushes and feigns delight at the comparison. How delighted, though, can he really be?

Johnson’s favourite books are Homer’s Iliad and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which is precisely what you’d probably guess for yourself if taking a punt in a pub quiz. Trump, after the Bible ("very special") favours his own autobiography, which it’s feasible he hasn’t read, either. I’m not aware of Johnson’s favourite Bible verse, but I bet he could recite plenty. The last time we met, which was years ago, he referred to the column I’d written the previous day and quoted a line from The Tempest which would have been perfect in it, if only I’d thought of it first. Not very Trumpish, that.

Outplayed yet again, and at their most bewildered, Trump’s critics will sometimes portray him as an idiot savant. Johnson is neither of those things. Ian Hislop’s famous line on the PM (that people always ask him “Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?” and that he always replies “No") is a tremendous insult, but elides the way that the real pretence here is not stupidity, but humility. The worst thing you could say about Johnson is that he exemplifies the British public school polish that can, at times, provide an impenetrable carapace over really not very much. Even here he differs dramatically from the president. Notoriously, some things can’t be polished.

Both men, true, are New York-born, and both now are socially liberal urbanites at the helm of traditional parties of the right. Both have wandering eyes and many, many children. Yet the similarities end there. Trump is an outlier Republican; Johnson has always been a Conservative darling. Trump regards himself as a no-nonsense businessman, taking a sledgehammer to the cosy world of the Ivy League-educated political and media elite. Johnson, in a British context, is that elite and has never shown much interest in being anything else.

He has never run a business, nor apparently wanted to. He didn’t even inherit one. “F*** business,” he famously said. At his most rousingly populist, Trump resents the fact that the likes of Johnson get called “elite” at all. “We got more money, we got more brains, we got better houses and apartments, we got nicer boats,” he once complained, at a rally. Johnson has no penthouses. He has no boat. Nor has he ever shown much sign in wanting either.

Beyond a trade deal, there is not even much diplomatic common ground. Trump favours a rapprochement with Russia; Johnson fought for tougher sanctions over the Salisbury poisonings and chemical attacks in Syria. Instinctively, Trump is protectionist. Johnson is anything but. “I would draw a very, very strong contrast between Brexit and any kind of isolationism,” he said on his first visit to the US as foreign secretary, explicitly rebutting a suggestion that Brexit was Trumpism in a bowler hat.

Yet there he is, with a new best friend. The comedian Andy Hamilton once joked on Radio 4 that all global leaders have puzzled over how to engage with the force of nature that is President Trump, and that Emmanuel Macron was the only one to have hit upon the “extremely bold strategy of initiating a homosexual relationship”. Johnson, with no less cynicism, is allowing the president to think of him as a protege, and a fan. For some of his supporters, and I suppose for most of his opponents, this is indeed what they want him to be. It’s not real, though, is it? It’s a performance. Had he the chance, he’d be mugging asides, like Fleabag. And privately, with one wary eye on his old friends back home, what a dread he must have of being believed.

The Times