Often called the “British Donald Trump,” former London Mayor Boris Johnson appears to be the frontrunner in the race for 10 Downing Street following the resignation last week of Prime Minister Theresa May.
But Boris is no Donald Trump. He is, in fact, the continuity candidate for a British Conservative Party long at odds with its base.
Conservative Party activists balked last week when given the opportunity to vote for the once-great party of Thatcher and Churchill. The appeal of May and Johnson was not enough to keep them from voting for the Brexit Party en masse—an amazing six-week-old outfit run by “Mr. Brexit,” Nigel Farage.
Speaking on his trip to London in 2018, President Trump said Johnson, the member of Parliament for Uxbridge (West London), “would be a great prime minister.” But he wasn’t a good mayor, he wasn’t a good foreign secretary, and he wasn’t a good advocate for the Leave campaign during Britain’s 2016 European Union membership referendum. What makes the president think he would a decent prime minister, let alone an ally of the United States?
After all, Boris has not been as kind to the president as the president has been to him.
Speaking ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Johnson said: “Crime has been falling steadily in both London and New York—and the only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”
It gets worse.
He has called Trump “out of his mind” and “stupefyingly ignorant.”
It gets worse, yet.
Speaking to ITN news, Johnson said candidate Trump was “frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States.”
Now Boris wants to meet with Trump next week in London. Trump should put the kibosh on that meeting because the two have almost nothing in common.
Boris completely underestimates the threat from China, and would try to derail Trump’s efforts on the international stage to bring the Communist regime to heel. He was recorded telling a meeting of the progressive “Conservative Way Forward” group: “We need to engage with China diplomatically, treat China as our friend and our partner, but also recognize that they are our commercial rivals. And they will try to stiff us.”
Johnson voted for the Iraq war, for gay marriage, for big government climate change solutions, and called migration “fantastic for the economy.” Just last year the former foreign secretary called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants living in Britain for 10 years or more.
You really think this guy would be an ally for Trump on the world stage?
But he’s currently the favorite, mostly because the Conservative Party in Britain has little else to offer and because the party establishment has already decided, much like they decided on May. And we all know how well she did on Brexit.
Boris will be no better. Having already been revealed to have written two letters—one backing remaining in the European Union and one backing leave—Boris is the ultimate political chameleon. America needs a more reliable ally than that.
Meanwhile, in the European Parliament, Farage and his Brexit Party will be pushing for a “hard Brexit”—which means leaving the European Union at the end of October without a deal and reverting to World Trade Organization terms. This is what Britain voted for, and something Boris Johnson rejected when he voted for Prime Minister May’s bodged withdrawal agreement a few months back.
All that’s left is for Boris to support a second referendum for his position to become as incomprehensible as that of Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. And frankly, it already seems to be in his cards. While Boris spins in the wind, Trump should send a signal to the British establishment next week and have dinner with Nigel instead: it might be only a matter of time until Nigel is PM, anyway.
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