Reports multiply of angry ministers complaining that Downing Street has made a horlicks of the incoming Trump transition and allowed Nigel Farage to steal the show. Certainly Don and Nige are big mates, see eye to eye on a good deal and Don wants Nige to be the Brit Ambassador to Washington. May has become all prim, like the bossy headmistress of an independent school, who nevertheless gets little actually done.
Boris has been left to offer support for our actual man already there, whom nobody has ever heard of. At the heart of all this is the chaotic state of the internal Brexit debate in the cabinet, leaving no spare time to focus on the epoch making change which has occurred to the American body politic. Gone are the niceties of diplomacy, the rituals, customs and protocols at which GB is gold star brilliant. Instead here is a non-politician billionaire incoming president, propelled to office by a revolution few saw coming or if they did shut their eyes, who communicates via Twitter and announces policy on YouTube. The biggest trade deals in history, one with the pacific Rim and one with the EU, have been killed off over night.
Meanwhile GB is struggling with Brexit, or at least political GB is, popular GB seems to have shrugged it off, its greatest upheaval since the end of WWII. The new president is an Anglophile and wants to help. That’s good news missed by May who is so busy-busy that she doesn’t open her post, so she missed it. Sorry open her Twitter feed. Perhaps she should refer to Churchill. Struggling Prime Ministers often do. He built up a very close relationship with Harry Hopkins, a confidante of FDR, during the dark days of 1940/41. Hopkins reported directly to the President of his conversations, by-passing both country’s respective ambassadors. He gave Churchill direct influence over the thinking in the White House.
Maybe something like that in reverse involving Farage would be a shrewd move now. Trouble is this blog fears May used up all her shrewd plotting for the leadership of the Tory party. There has been little sign of it since.