Let's face the truth about how Steve Bannon and his fellow Americans will see Boris Johnson

It is often said that Johnson is a very clever man pretending to be an idiot – but that is not always obvious, and less so in an environment like the US, which is still coming to grips with the concept of deep, multilayered British irony

Boris Johnson is an exotic figure, veering constantly between buffoonery and statesmanship

We’re used to him, but what on earth will the Americans make of the Right Honourable Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson MP, Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?

Hard to say. Boris Johnson is an exotic figure, his political and personal lives bathed in colour, veering constantly between buffoonery and statesmanship. Will he attempt to entertain them? It is often said that Johnson is a very clever man pretending to be an idiot – but that is not always obvious, and less so in an environment like the US, which is still coming to grips with the concept of deep, multilayered British irony.

Those unused to him may simply conclude that this chubby, tousle-haired bundle of contradictions is, in fact, simply an idiot, or at least not serious. As Benjamin Franklin said, time is money, and they may not have the time to spare to work out who the real Boris is. Even the lad himself may not have sorted that one out yet.

That is because, for all their good manners and ritual obeisance to the “special relationship”, Britain doesn't matter as much to America as America does to Britain. It's true that Nigel Farage has more of a special relationship with the new regime than the UK does, but this is because of this vague ideological affiliation with the two wings of transatlantic populism, not great power politics. And don't forget how Boris and Michael Gove cut Farage and Ukip out of the official Leave campaign.

Theresa May has also repeated her view about how “unacceptable” Donald Trump's locker room banter was. May has even less in common with Trump than Boris, whose attitude to women would justify an article in itself. The Foreign Secretary has his work cut out.

At first glance, Boris doesn't have a huge amount in common with the two key Trumpites he has met and, with luck, charmed.

Jared Kushner, husband to Ivanka Trump and campaign manager for Donald Trump, is a real-estate businessman, and his principal interests lie outside the usual Bozza orbit of political self-advancement and mischief-making (often, as we saw in the summer, closely allied hobbies). Steve Bannon, chief strategist and Senior Counsellor to the President-elect, is more of a political animal.

Like Johnson, Bannon has a journalistic background of sorts, as one of the founders of the radical right-inclined Breitbart News. Johnson used to write columns for The Daily Telegraph and edited The Spectator, which, for all their Thatcherite instincts, were not as iconoclastically hostile to the political order as the American radical right. Nor as successful, one might add.

Bannon has the same talent for the outspoken quip as Johnson, as when he whimsically allied himself to Darth Vader and Satan, though even Boris might have thought twice about that one. Neither of these big figures of the Trump circle are given to freely speaking in Latin and drawing casually on allusions to the Battle of Thermopylae. One can only hope Boris doesn't patronise them and fall into the classic British trap of playing the civilised Greek to their mighty but unsophisticated Romans – a very silly analogy. Johnson will no doubt see more eye to eye with the conventional Republicans in Washington than the Trump clique in NYC, but that isn't really what is mission is about.

So, in more ways than one, Boris and the Americans speak different languages. Boris is, in many ways, a liberal. He showed that as Mayor of London, he showed it when he made those frank statements about the Iranians and Saudis running proxy wars, and he did so when he condemned Russian war crimes in Syria.

Warm personal relations are better than the alternative, of course. Yet, in the end, those sort of things – shared interests and shared judgements – will drive the US-UK relationship, as it always had. Tony Blair was famously close to George W Bush, but the Americans were always going to invade Iraq and take out Saddam whether Britain, or the UN, liked it or not.

Even in the Second World War, President Franklin D Roosevelt was happy to ignore Winston Churchill’s warnings and hand eastern Europe over to Stalin. Britain relies on the US for its nuclear deterrent, for economic support (especially post-Brexit) and for its wider security. The Americans don't need Britain. No one, not even Boris at his best, can persuade them otherwise.