Boris Johnson had three months to realise a war on ‘woke’ was a very bad idea

The prime minister has gone remarkably quiet on the subject of Biden removing the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. With no more Trump, Little Britain is out on its own once again

In some ways, Donald Trump’s incitement of the white supremacist march on the Capitol exposed some potential flaws in a system in which a president can lose an election but then remain in power for three more months with absolutely nothing to lose.  

But there are upsides too. Not least, it gives even the very stupidest world leaders a very long time indeed to work out that it would arguably be best not to start any new culture wars in which you’ll shortly end up on the wrong side.  

Not long enough, alas, for Boris Johnson. Having spent the last year declaring war on the “woke”, to the extent his communities secretary Robert Jenrick published an article this weekend in which he revealed actual legislation is planned to take on “woke worthies”, whatever that is meant to mean, he suddenly now must deal with an American president who actually does stand for all of the real things he has caricatured in his characteristic dimness.

When asked by Sky News, “Is Joe Biden woke?” the prime minister spent a full minute waffling out an answer that was somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent growl noises, and the only detectable words being “There is nothing wrong with being woke.”

Which, as has already been explained, is a tricky position to hold when just a few days ago members of your cabinet were writing very weird articles about how being “woke” will in fact shortly be punishable by law.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked, as business tycoon Warren Buffett once said. Boris Johnson has had three months to work out that the tide was going out on him, a sort of super-advanced tsunami warning, but nevertheless he entirely failed to see it coming.

The consequences of this are, for example, the truly toe-curling scenes that occurred on the official Downing Street press briefing on Thursday morning. (These briefings are still not being televised. It is, after all, only three months since the taxpayer began paying the new press secretary Allegra Stratton £100,000 a year to hold daily televised press briefings, which still haven’t started, but why rush?)

The culture war over the bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office predates by almost a full decade the culture war over Winston Churchill himself. In a nutshell, Tony Blair lent it to George W Bush. Barack Obama removed it (his explanation being that, well, there are only so many ornamental tables in there, and being the first black president, he felt he should have one of Martin Luther King instead), Trump put a different Churchill bust back in there, which Joe Biden has now removed.

Asked to comment on the bust’s removal, in sadly untelevised scenes, the prime minister’s spokesperson, Jamie Davies, would explain that, “It is for the president to decorate the Oval Office as he sees fit.”

We would be told these precise words on seven separate occasions.

The trouble is, four years ago, Johnson described Obama’s decision to remove it as “a snub to Britain” and had been motivated by “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

When you’ve got Donald Trump in the White House, a certain amount of cover is provided to other world leaders, who are merely glibly and perhaps jovially racist. That cover is now blown, and the eminently foreseeable though still unforeseen consequences will be scenes like these, reported verbatim, between the journalist chairing the daily briefing, and the prime minister’s spokesperson, coming shortly to a TV screen near you.

“If it’s for the president to decorate the Oval Office as he sees fit, why did [Boris Johnson] make such a fuss about it last time?”

“As I’ve said, it is for the president to decorate the Oval Office as he sees fit.”

“He specifically said previously that it was a snub to Britain.”

“Again, as I said, it is for the president to decorate the Oval Office as he sees fit.”

"Can you clarify what the difference is between his response to Barack Obama and to Joe Biden? Does he regret his earlier comments?”

“Again, I’ve answered this. It is for the president to decide how he decorates the Oval Office.”

“Is the difference that Obama had, and I quote, ‘an ancestral dislike of the British empire’?”

“As I’ve said, it’s for the president to decide how to decorate the Oval Office. The important thing is that we will continue to have a special relationship with Joe Biden.”

How special that relationship will be remains to be seen, though it began hours after Biden’s victory, when one of his staffers referred to Boris Johnson as a “shape-shifting creep”.

The early indication would be that Little Britain is out on its own, back to being the international pariah it once was in the short months of 2016, before Trump came along, asking to have his hand held as he walked down the stairs.

Of course, we are ably assisted by having the highest per capita Covid-19 death rate of any developed country in the world, higher now than the US, whom we so like to laugh at.

America’s previous president made himself look very stupid indeed by instructing his newly appointed Covid-19 response doctor to investigate the possibility of killing the virus by injecting people with disinfectant.

That sort of thing makes a guy who merely boasts of going into hospitals and shaking hands with coronavirus patients look vaguely plausible.

But yes, that particular show is over. The number of balding blond-haired narcissists bestriding the world stage has been reduced by fifty per cent, from two to one. It’s going to be a very lonely place indeed, both for him and the rest of us.