I TOLD YOU SO ABOUT JOE

WELL, well. The first European leader to get a call from Joe Biden since his inauguration was … Boris Johnson.

This will come as a big surprise to all those who said that ‘Irish’ Joe B is antiBritish, or the many who claimed that Johnson would be shunned by Biden because of his previous friendliness with Donald Trump.

Only a fortnight ago, the Financial Times ran an article by the former UK ambassador in Washington, Kim Darroch, under the headline ‘Johnson’s fawning to Trump will have done the UK no favours with Biden’. Really? The conversation between President Biden and the Prime Minister was said to be ‘very warm, friendly and wide ranging’.

It is true the new President had a while back dismissed Johnson as a ‘physical and emotional clone’ of Trump.

But Biden is an intensely pragmatic politician: now he is where the buck stops, he wants to have a good working relationship with America’s closest ally. Speaking of which, in October I wrote here about how, in 1982, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden had spoken vehemently in support of the British government in the early stages of the Falklands conflict.

This was when President Reagan was equivocating, and America’s ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, was openly pro-Argentine. Biden, however, declared that the U.S. should stand by ‘our oldest and closest ally’.

I dug this out of the records because the Press and airwaves had been full of pundits saying Biden is anti-British.

The same crowd — and especially those deeply opposed to Brexit, who relish any sign that this has reduced the UK’s status in the world — are now saying it’s meaningless that Biden called Johnson before he did Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron.

Imagine what they would have been saying if Biden had put Johnson at the back of that diplomatic queue.