Meet Trump’s team of US Brexiteers
Ahead of the president’s visit, a camera team went behind the scenes at the London embassy.
Days before President Trump was due to open the new US embassy in London in January, he tweeted that he was abandoning the trip, dubbing the move from Mayfair to south London a “bad deal”.
No one was more disappointed than Robert “Woody” Johnson, the US ambassador to the UK, who is a good friend of the president.
“You accept the reality you’re given,” says Johnson. “But it’s like anything else: we’re going to make the best of it and we’re going to be very enthusiastic.”
The episode was yet another example of the tension that has been building between the US and UK since Trump’s inauguration.
Two months prior to the cancellation, Trump was ticked off by Theresa May for sharing tweets from the far-right Britain First group that claimed to show videos of “Muslims beating up a Dutch boy on crutches”, but were in fact fake.
Trump, in turn, has grown frustrated with May’s “school mistress” tone, allies of the president told The Daily Telegraph earlier this month.
But although some believe Anglo-american relations have reached a nadir, Trump’s team in London is enthusiastic in its belief that the special relationship is alive and kicking.
Ahead of the president’s first trip to London on July 13 – which is expected to attract large-scale demonstrations – a Channel 4 series called Inside the American Embassy was given unprecedented access to Johnson and his band of Londonbased Brexiteers’ first months in office, toiling to improve Trump’s reputation in the UK.
Johnson – “everybody calls me Woody” – was appointed US ambassador to the UK in September 2017, and is determined to unite the nations and offset the president’s more haphazard style of Twitter diplomacy.
The all-american billionaire businessman’s comments made headlines themselves this week, as a preview of the documentary showed Woody urging Brits to drop their “defeatist attitude towards Brexit”, and work with him to turn it into a great opportunity.
“How can a country with this great a history, this great a language, this great a legal system and this great a presence not be successful?” he asks. “I read nothing in the papers about anybody having a positive attitude towards Brexit of the future. As an American, I’m just not used to hearing that.”
One of the world’s 500 richest people, Johnson, 71, is heir to the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, owner of the New York Jets American football team, and has a net worth of $4.2billion, according to Bloomberg. Like Trump, he treats the political sphere as he does the corporate world.
“Woody is incredibly disarming and charming,” says Simon Gilchrist, series producer of Inside the American Embassy. “He’s a brash, confident New Yorker. People warm to that and enjoy it.”
When Trump appointed Johnson as ambassador, after he raised $18 million (£14 million) for his presidential campaign, it was with the goal of nurturing the special relationship so it can flourish after Brexit.
“Some people are sceptical of the special relationship, but there should be no scepticism,” says Johnson when we meet at the sparkling new embassy building in Nine Elms, “because the bond is there and it’s very, very powerful.”
Despite their own 30-year friendship, it is unclear how much contact Johnson has with Trump. The president has, on more than one occasion, sent the ambassador’s work into disarray with a tweet.
The lack of communication means that, weeks before Trump is due to visit the UK, the embassy still don’t know what his movements will be when he arrives.
“Normally, one month before a visit we would have a pretty good idea of the schedule, but we don’t have any details in this case,” says Lew Lukens, the embassy’s deputy chief of mission. “The team from Washington that travels in advance of a visit to set up the programme was completely wrapped up with the Singapore summit, so they haven’t been here yet.”
Despite the disorder, embassy staff remain a model of statesmanship in action. “Diplomacy in the age of Twitter is something we’re all getting used to,” says Courtney Austrian, counsellor for public affairs. “One thing I will say about President Trump is he’s very masterful in his ability to get his message across.” On his visit to the UK, Trump will meet Theresa May and is expected to meet the Queen – although this could be postponed until a longer state visit next year. Will he visit the embassy? Staff hope so. Although architects have scorned the £750million embassy building as an American “Travelodge” on the Thames, it is certainly a swisher space to wait for a visa. Every day, its 1,000 employees walk past an original copy of the Declaration of Independence from 1823 and a wall engraved with all the names of the US ambassadors to the UK, five of whom went on to be president.
Marines walk through the halls carrying sidearms. And one floor houses a “little America”, where staff can buy Jif peanut butter, beef jerky, Gatorade and Oscar Mayer hot dogs.
Jennifer Williams, a press officer, an “immaculate Texan gal”, is an integral member of Johnson’s team. Before coming to London, she was posted to Lebanon, where she introduced rodeo riding through a cultural exchange. As part of her job, Williams writes measured tweets for the ambassador and trains him in diplomacy.
The documentary shows Williams running Johnson through a “murder board” of questions, ahead of his first appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme in December. Justin Webb might ask about the US moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, she suggests; if so, it would be good for Johnson to say the president has “urged for calm in the region”.
“Urged for calm?” Woody repeats, with sincerity. “That’s gonna do it. That does it every time.”
The staff, many of whom are new to London because of a three-year turnover rule, seem enamoured by British quirks. Eric Langer, an assistant to the ambassador who reads all correspondence from the British public, is amazed that no matter how nasty letter-writers are about Trump, they will always be polite.
“What stands out to Eric is that despite being abusive, letters will always have ‘yours sincerely’ and the person’s address at the bottom,” says Gilchrist. “It’s a very British form of complaint.”
Johnson, like the majority of his embassy colleagues is an Anglophile. He’s fascinated by Roman British history, gets excited when invited to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and loves Winston Churchill.
“He coined the term ‘special relationship’, and he’ll be looking down on all of us and judging whether we’re doing a good job,” says Johnson, excitedly pointing to the portrait of Churchill in his office.
Gilchrist explains, “Woody identifies with Churchill for embodying that bulldog spirit.” Over the past year, the producer has seen Johnson adopt this style himself.
“He’s in football coach mode – ‘Come on Britain, get back into the game’ – that kind of thing,” says Gilchrist.
Earlier this year, his cameras captured Johnson inviting British entrepreneurs to the embassy to extol the virtues of Anglo-american trade.
“There’s no better time to be in the US,” says Woody, to a room full of wide-eyed business owners. “You, all you guys, can come up with something new, make a billion dollars each and call it a day. You’re going to grow… you’re going to make a lot of money, and you’re going to employ Americans. And we’ll all be proud of you.”
As upbeat as the embassy staff are about maintaining the special relationship and thawing the British attitude towards Trump, there is one foreign policy item that does get them down: chlorinated chicken.
“It genuinely upsets them,” says Gilchrist. “All of the Americans in the embassy take it personally how down we’ve been on their chlorinated chicken. They think it’s really good chicken. People stop you and say, ‘When you were in America, did you eat the chicken? How did it taste?’”
Expect poultry PR to feature heavily on Woody’s to-do list for the next year, then – nestled somewhere just below Brexit.