I'm watching my country collapse from afar — but Boris Johnson's UN meeting with Trump made me oddly optimistic

Boris looked uncomfortable when Trump referred to him as his 'friend', and cut in to say, 'The NHS is not for sale'

There’s nothing like moving to America to make you realise how little your small, European country’s politics matter. When I came out to New York, I was fresh from three years of reporting on Brexit: I’d stood in the newsroom and watched the EU referendum results come out, and then, not long after, I’d battled through the rain at 4am to get to the office and deal with the aftermath of the 2016 US election. To me, both seemed equally cataclysmic — but Brexit was painful on a personal level. I was glad to touch down on US soil and throw myself into covering the politics of the upcoming 2020 election and the Democratic debates; it felt like a reprieve.

Over the last nine months that I’ve been resident in the US, my home country has undergone huge political turmoil which I’ve mostly learnt about through a barrage of panicked messages from friends and family at antisocial hours. When Boris Johnson became prime minister, I felt it like a dull thud. I remembered watching the shenanigans between him and Michael Gove play out a couple of years before and wondering whether it would all work out for him. The fact that it did, against all odds — and the fact that I cared, while US television rolled on, oblivious, and New Yorkers admitted they weren’t sure who the British PM was half the time anyway — made the rolling news on my phone’s BBC app feel like a niche political drama where I was one of its only ardent followers.

So it was this week when the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s advice to the Queen to prorogue parliament for five weeks before the Brexit deadline was unlawful. Speaking to my UK colleagues, it was clear they took the news very seriously (right down to the type of brooch the ruling judge was wearing.) But few of my US friends had any idea what had happened, even though it featured prominently in the New York Times. The news didn’t even warrant discussion on the breakfast shows. “Does this mean Brexit isn’t happening?” a couple of people asked; then, when I said no, they shrugged and said, “Get back to me when a real development happens.”

It’s brutal, but it’s an assessment of the situation I share. The ruling was big news for a small island, but it didn’t have any international significance. Brexit, with its potential for global trade upheaval and its effects on the UK’s currency, is interesting to North Americans (though being told to “quickly summarize the situation” over a beer with a couple of interested Canadians in Toronto left me a little blind-sided. When you’ve covered the ins and outs of the thing for three years, how are you supposed to answer?) A ruling on the proroguing of parliament just isn’t the same.

Here in the US, as the UK Supreme Court ruling came through, we were working to respond to allegations against Donald Trump that he had effectively offered the Ukrainian president foreign aid in exchange for digging dirt up on the son of Trump’s likely rival in 2020, Joe Biden. Later in the day, Nancy Pelosi announced that she was beginning impeachment procedures on behalf of the Democrats. Previously, moderate Dems — Pelosi included — have refused to utter the "i word", worrying that it might accrue them bad political karma for the next election. But how else can you respond when a whistleblower within the world’s most respected intelligence service has expressed grave concerns about the leader of the country? In this kind of a news agenda, few people are worried about whether MPs will sit in the House of Commons in London and discuss Brexit with each other for a few extra weeks.

Like me, Boris Johnson is currently in New York, currently attending the United Nations’ General Assembly before flying back early to face urgent questions in parliament. He met with Trump on Tuesday morning, and I watched their joint press conference with interest. Trump referred to his British counterpart as “my friend Boris” four times in seven minutes, and he made his usual bombastic remarks about “quadrupling our trade” and doing deals. It was clear that Boris, however, wanted to differentiate himself from the American president at a time when he’s no doubt been advised to keep an eye on his personal PR. “We must always remember that the NHS is not for sale,” he cut in, when Trump mentioned trade representatives from each country preparing for “lots of meetings”. Each time The Donald referred to him as a personal friend, he smiled uncomfortably and awkwardly repositioned himself on his seat.

When an American reporter asked Johnson whether he would heed calls to resign after the Supreme Court ruling, the prime minister again was unusually measured. Although he said he “disagrees profoundly” with what Lady Hale had to say, the first words out of his mouth were: “We respect the judiciary in our country” and when Trump, in his buddy-buddy manner, said to Boris that he’d had trouble with his own Supreme Court in the end but ultimately “won out, got the wall” and managed to push through his own agenda — “I’m sure that’s gonna happen for you,” he added — Boris blustered about “not counting our chickens” before getting back on message with: “We’re going to respect the court”.

Similarly, when Trump took offense to the resignation question on Johnson’s behalf and said, “That was a very nasty question from an American reporter,” Boris responded, “I think he was asking a question, to be fair, that a lot of British reporters would have asked.” It was clear that he was being mindful not to insult the US president, but also to differentiate himself from him publicly: he can’t afford, at this moment in time, to join the anti-free press “fake news” circus or to be referred to any longer as “the British Trump”. Next to the US president, who batted off a question about Ukraine as if it didn’t matter, I hate to say it but Boris Johnson looked like a proper leader.

There was one moment when Trump did speak for the whole of his country, though. When asked how he reacted when he heard of the UK Supreme Court ruling, he shrugged and replied: “I had no reaction.” He then followed up with: “I asked Boris, and he said it’s just another day in the office.” After months of seemingly endless twists and turns in the Brexit story, even something as seemingly dramatic as Supreme Court involvement is unlikely to get much reaction from any other American, either. This kind of chaos is what other countries now think of as business as usual for Britain. What that means for our future is a subject for another column entirely.