Biden’s election: a headache for No. 10?
Boris Johnson joked to aides last week that he felt upbeat about developing a special relationship with Joe Biden, as he was “one of the few world leaders I haven’t insulted”. The officials laughed, said Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times, but there is actually real concern in No. 10 about what Biden’s victory might mean for Britain. America’s new presidentelect is no great fan of Johnson, whom he described last December as a “physical and emotional clone” of Donald Trump. Biden hasn’t forgiven the PM for writing, during the EU referendum, that his old boss Barack Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office was a “symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”. His vice-president-elect Kamala Harris apparently feels much the same about the PM. “If you think Joe hates him, you should hear Kamala,” says one senior aide.
I expect relations between Washington and London will be “cool” for a while, said Kim Darroch, Britain’s former ambassador to the US, in The Guardian. But Biden is “nothing if not a pragmatist”, so there’s no reason to believe he won’t want to work closely with London. Britain will get a chance to build bridges next year, when it hosts the G7 meeting and the big international climate change conference Cop26. We certainly shouldn’t worry too much about the chemistry between Biden and the PM, who have yet to meet in person, said Nick Timothy in The Daily Telegraph. For one thing, Johnson is no Trump clone: he’s a free-trader, not a protectionist, with liberal views on issues such as climate change, gay marriage and amnesties for illegal immigrants. Besides, the US-UK partnership has always been founded more on common interests and security challenges than the “shared philosophy” of presidents and prime ministers.
In fact, Biden’s election is already having an impact – on Brexit, said Therese Raphael on Bloomberg. Trump’s “very presence encouraged Johnson’s Brexit brinkmanship with Brussels”, as the PM knew the White House was hostile to the EU and supported his threats to walk away from talks. But Biden, who is proud of his Irish heritage, opposed Brexit and has made clear that the British Government can forget securing any trade deal with America if it undermines the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. This has put the PM under even greater pressure during the dying days of the trade talks between Britain and the EU. How those negotiations unfold over the next few weeks “will dictate whether a businesslike familiarity returns to London and Washington’s relations or the differences are amplified”.