Boris Johnson is desperate for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump – and it’s clear why

A defeat for the current president could liberate the prime minister to forge a more popular special relationship with the US, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson would like to see Donald Trump’s White House tenure end at one term (Reuters)

The prime minister suffers from “private neuralgia” about being associated with Donald Trump, according to Tim Shipman, the author who has chronicled Boris Johnson’s victory in the EU referendum and his rise to No 10.

Part of the reason for this aversion is obvious: Trump is exceptionally unpopular with the British public. Johnson finds himself in a similar bind to Tony Blair, when Al Gore failed to win the few hundred votes he needed in Florida to avoid the election being sent to the US Supreme Court.

For Blair, the US-UK partnership was an “article of faith”, to be maintained regardless of personalities, but for his party and much of British public opinion it was as much an article of faith that George W Bush was a dangerous simpleton with whom the British government should have as little to do as possible.

If Bush was dangerous, then Trump is more so, which is why popular anti-Americanism, a strong but minority strand among the British people, has been magnified by pro-Americans who regard Trump as an affront to the values of the republic.

In Blair’s case, the damage done at home by the special relationship was magnified by the clash of left and right – many in the Labour Party regarded Blair as a traitor for fraternising with the ideological enemy in the Republican Party – but for Johnson the damage is worse. He is accused of hanging out with an ideological soulmate.

He is the “Britain Trump”, as the America Trump once described him, and the America Trump sees Brexit, and Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, as mere provinces of his Greater Ego – in the way that he quite plainly did not see Theresa May.

Johnson tolerates Trump’s embrace, but cannot wait for it to end. You can see why he would much prefer to be dealing with Joe Biden. Biden wouldn’t change policies much. He would still be hostile to China, and it would be just as difficult to negotiate a US-UK trade deal with him in the White House. But he would run a conventional and predictable US administration. And Johnson wouldn’t be tainted by the authoritarianism, racism and misogyny of the Trump White House.

Of course, there would then be the danger for Johnson of being seen as one of the Trumpier world leaders, bracketed in Trump’s absence with Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Andrzej Duda in Poland and Viktor Orban in Hungary. But, as Shipman points out, a Biden presidency could also liberate the “Good Boris”: the one who wants to build international alliances and to pursue global action on climate change; the one who declared he was not a Sinophobe but offered Hong Kong people a route to British citizenship.

This Johnson, the One Nation liberal Conservative who co-exists in the same chaotic persona as “Bad Boris”, the Brexity national populist, could form a perfectly amicable ideological bond with a conservative courtly Democrat.

Indeed, wanting Trump to lose is a powerful reason for wanting Biden to win in November. But the side-effect at home of liberating Johnson to be more of the One Nation liberal centrist that he was as Mayor of London is yet another reason to cheer on the people’s Joe.