Now really, chaps, that’s quite enough. I must say it here: Boris Johnson is not Donald Trump. He doesn’t resemble the president except in the most superficial ways.
Yes, they were both born in New York. Yes, they are both large men with large appetites and large families. Yes, like the poet in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, they both have flashing eyes and floating blonde hair. But, when it comes to their outlook and instincts, they could hardly be more different.
Not that that stops supporters and opponents from drawing silly parallels.
“Boris Johnson is basically what you’d get if you sent Donald Trump to Eton,” says the new leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, Jo Swinson, referencing the famous private school where Boris was educated.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, concurs. “If you look at 2016, Brexit and the Trump election are inextricably linked,” he told the BBC this week. Continental European media treat the two men as virtually interchangeable.
The comparison evidently appeals to The Donald himself. Welcoming Boris’ victory, he told a rally, “They’re saying ‘Britain Trump.’ They call him ‘Britain Trump.’” For what it’s worth, no one in Britain, to my knowledge, has called him that, but you take the point: Boris is supposed to represent, Trump-like, a people’s revolt against the elite, a refreshing and honest challenge to politically correct pieties.
So it might surprise you to learn that one of Boris’ first acts was to declare that he wanted an amnesty for illegal immigrants in the U.K.
Yes, that’s right. Unlike Trump, Boris has only ever supported his current party, yet his Toryism has always been moderate and tempered. He is pro-choice on abortion. As mayor of London, he introduced a living wage higher than the national minimum wage, and through a combination of cajolery and direct pressure, he pushed employers into accepting it. He has appointed the most ethnically diverse Cabinet in British history – to the visible fury of the Left, who have poured out disgusting abuse in response.
The editor of the main Corbynista website, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, declared that anyone from a minority group joining a Tory government “is no longer a person of color – they’re a turncoat of color.” Dr. Priyamvada Gopal, who has been inveighing against Cambridge University’s colonial curriculum, declares that “‘some brown’ is not always better than ‘no brown’ if essentially what you’re furthering is white supremacy anyway – and vicious exploitation. For heaven’t sake (sic), it’s not rocket science.” For good measure, she added – without a shred of evidence – that “much Asian Toryism is built on anti-blackness.”
Even Clive Lewis, a Labour shadow minister, told the new Conservative Party chairman, a black former army officer named James Cleverly, “I’m just sorry you and the other black members of that Cabinet had to sell your souls and your self-respect to get there.”
Now, perhaps, we get to the real reason that people draw the Boris-Trump parallel. It’s not so much about the two men, as about the people who oppose them, whom they effortlessly drive nuts. For three years in this column, I have been pointing out that Trump is lucky in his enemies. Instead of attacking him in ways that might convince undecided voters, they insult him in the formulaic way that insults anyone to their right: racist-sexist-homophobe-yada-yada. Now they are doing the same to Boris, so manifestly absurdly that moderate opinion is rallying to him.
Theresa May spent most of the last two years level-pegging with a Labour Party that would, in normal circumstances, be unelectable. Boris, at the time of writing, has opened up a ten-point lead.
Having the same enemies, though, doesn’t make the two men alike. Boris is an intellectual, studiously polite about his opponents. His popularity rests largely on his sense of humor and skilled wordplay. More to the point, Boris is a relentless optimist. Where Trump appeals to people’s wariness, making effective but untrue claims about rising crime, uncontrolled immigration, jobs destroyed by trade and so on, Boris is a Tigger among Eeyores. In a country whose intellectual elites (never a cheerful bunch at the best of times) have already been thrown into black despair by the 2016 Brexit referendum, he radiates a can-do spirit, seeing a global future as an opportunity to grasp rather than a problem to manage.
Up at the top of his list, I’m glad to say, is a trade deal with the United States – an objective so obviously beneficial to both parties that, on this issue at least, Trump sounds every bit as optimistic as Boris.
Perhaps, in that narrow and specific case, the critics are on to something, and the two leaders, whose interests align so closely, are indeed alike. Good.
