- Boris Johnson has an uphill battle to get rid of his associations with Trump and build a relationship with Biden.
- Biden’s allies say the Prime Minister’s previous comments and ties to Trump are an obstacle for the two men to build a strong relationship.
- “I believe that Boris is loved by [the administration]? No, “a Biden replacement told Insider.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
It was a sign of how Boris Johnson is committed to repairing relations with President Joe Biden that his office last week rejected several requests to criticize Biden’s removal of the Winston Churchill bust from the Oval Office.
“The Oval Office is the president’s private office and it is up to the president to decorate as he pleases,” was the only comment the official prime minister’s spokesman would make.
The tone was markedly different from Johnson’s reaction to removing the bust of Biden’s predecessor, Barack Obama, in 2016.
At that time, Johnson, who wrote a biography of Churchill, devoted an entire newspaper column to the decision, ridiculing the removal of the bust by President Obama as “contempt” for Britain, caused by the “ancestral antipathy of the partial Kenyan president for the Empire British.”
The line, with its apparent racial overtones, is still remembered by President Biden and his team.
“Joe has a long memory” about these things, a Biden campaign source told Insider last year.
Since Biden’s victory, Downing Street officials have been arguing intensely about common ground between the UK and the US on issues such as climate change, and both sides reported a warm and constructive phone call when the pair first spoke at the last weekend.
However, Johnson’s ties to Trump, both personally and in his political style, remain a source of distrust among Biden’s allies.
“Boris said a lot of things,” said Ashish Prashar, a Biden-Harris campaign replacement and advocate for justice reform for Insider. “He allied with people like Steve Bannon. He made public his resignations around the birth of President Obama.”
Biden’s move to become a more progressive politician also pits him against Johnson, Prashar said.
He highlighted the president’s vocal support for transgender rights, his diverse cabinet and his efforts to pass egalitarian marriage legislation in 2012.
“He did the reverse of the troop that you become conservative as you get older,” said Prashar.
Biden last year compared Boris Johnson to a “physical and emotional clone” of Donald Trump, and getting rid of those associations is proving to be an uphill battle for Johnson.
While many world leaders tried to establish close relations with Trump, Johnson went further, speaking repeatedly with admiration from the former president. He would also have been in close contact for a while with U.S. alt-right taunt Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager.
Biden’s senior team also sees Brexit as a significant mistake. Last year, there was an alarm in London when Biden gave Johnson a severe warning about the impact of his Brexit plans in Northern Ireland.
However, there is recognition on both sides of the Atlantic that the two men need to work together in common interests after the Trump era. Both leaders face the monumental domestic task of vaccinating their own populations against COVID and eradicating the virus globally.
In addition, Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, face the task of restoring America’s position on the world stage after four years. Trump often treated US allies with disdain or suspicion.
That task will be “massive,” said Mike Blake, vice president of the Democratic National Committee, in an interview with Insider.
However, he stressed that Biden’s long experience means that he has the capacity to perform the task.
“The second dynamic of this is that you have a leader ready to do that,” he said.
“You can make the very clear point that President Biden is the most qualified person to become president in our history. When you have someone who has been in the Senate for 36 years, a person who has been a vice president for 8 years, the relationships he has: Immediately will allow the restoration to build from there. “
Boris Johnson’s team is looking forward to the G7 summit in June, when world leaders will meet in person for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnson hopes to use the summit, as well as a climate change summit later in the year, to push his green credentials to a president who has put climate change at the center of his agenda.
However, whether Johnson and Biden will have a warm relationship is another matter.
But even if Biden remains suspicious of Johnson, maintaining relations with one of America’s close allies will remain the priority.
“I believe that the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States will remain strong. There are many reasons why we are inextricably linked,” Prashar told Insider.
“But I believe that Boris is loved by [the new administration]? No.”