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      PM channels his inner John Wayne in vaccine metaphor meltdown | John Crace

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      Shortly before 5pm in the UK, president-elect Joe Biden gave a press conference. The results of the trials were very promising, he said, but there was still a long way to go before a vaccination programme could be rolled out nationwide. So it was now more important than ever not to let your guard down and to carry on wearing masks. It was coherent, informative and in less than five minutes Biden had told Americans just about everything they needed to know.
      Boris Johnson likes to do things rather differently. Almost to the second after Biden had finished speaking, the prime minister stepped out into the Downing Street briefing room, flanked by the deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, and Brigadier Joe Fossey, dressed in full camo gear that had the reverse effect of drawing attention to himself. A new form of anti-camo perhaps.
      After a few introductions, Boris went on one of his long rambles. He didn’t really have anything to say that couldn’t have been wrapped up in minutes but he considers a press conference not to have taken place unless he’s wasted the best part of an hour of everyone’s time.
      Perhaps it was the excitement of having a real life soldier standing next to him, but Johnson’s explanation of the new vaccination was relayed in a series of metaphors straight out of the movie Stagecoach. The arrows were in the quiver! The cavalry was on its way, the toot of the bugle – Michael Gove’s presumably – was getting louder but still some way off. Having a prime minister who manages to trivialise something really important is getting extremely draining and it’s hard not to zone out within moments of him starting a sentence. So much for the great communicator.
      Next up was the brigadier who is in charge of the mass testing in Liverpool and looked uncomfortable throughout. “Two thousand troops have answered the call,” he said, making it sound as if the soldiers had had some say in their deployment rather than been told they were off to Liverpool for the next four weeks.
      He then pulled out a piece of plastic from his pocket. “You know what a swab is,” he continued. “Well this is the lateral flow that gives you a result within an hour.” And that was all he had to say. He didn’t seem at all sure what the lateral flow actually was or how it worked but then he was only following orders. If he’d had his way, he’d have saved the taxpayer a return train ticket from Liverpool to London.
      There was no slideshow this time – obviously No 10 has started to wonder if they are more trouble than they are worth after recent events – so Van-Tam was left to ad lib on the vaccine trial. Even though he had no more information than Boris, so all he could do was repeat the fact that it was exciting but we shouldn’t get carried away just yet. Try to think of it as a penalty shootout, he said – Boris’s crap analogies are as contagious as the coronavirus. We’ve scored the first goal, so we know the keeper can be beaten, but there was a long way to go before the match was won. No one seemed to have told Van-Tam that the expectation in a shootout was that the penalty-taker would score.
      Things carried on in much the same vein when questions came in from the media. The brigadier tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible – merging into the background was part of his SAS training – and so the only other thing he had to offer was that he was just on day four of his deployment so it was hard to tell whether things were going well or badly. Van-Tam desperately hunted around for new ways of saying the vaccination trials were still at an early stage, but things were looking more hopeful for next year.
      Try to think of yourself as being on a railway station on a wet and windy night, he said, doing his best to channel his inner Fat Controller. You could see the lights of the train two miles away. Then the train pulled into the station and you didn’t know if the door was going to open. Next you couldn’t even be sure of whether there would be enough seats for everyone. The UK had only ordered enough vaccine for about a third of the population, so unless more doses came online most people were going to miss out. It didn’t sound quite as hopeful as he had suggested. But maybe that’s just the way he tells them.
      Boris, meanwhile, just looked relieved to only get one question on the US presidential election. And that wasn’t even on if he had spoken to the president-elect – he hadn’t as Biden has been too busy taking calls from Micronesia – or if he had any reaction to being called a “shape-shifting creep” by a former adviser to Barack Obama. The Democrats still haven’t forgiven Boris for his remarks about Obama’s part-Kenyan ancestry giving him a dislike of the British empire.
      “I congratulate the president-elect,” said Johnson, sidestepping a suggestion he give Donald Trump a call to persuade him to throw in the towel. The US and the UK had had a close relationship in the past and no doubt would do so in the future. He had nothing to say on Brexit. Rather he chose to accentuate the shared climate change objectives of Cop27. Or Cop26 as the rest of the world knows it. More

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      The Guardian view on Johnson's Biden problem: not going away | Editorial

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      The Irish question has played havoc with the best-laid plans of hardline Brexiters. Since 2016, successive Conservative governments have struggled to square the circle of keeping the United Kingdom intact, while avoiding the reimposition of a hard border on the island of Ireland. The border issue has been the achilles heel of Brexit, the thorn in the side of true believers in a “clean break” with the EU. So the prospect of an Irish-American politician on his way to the White House, just as Boris Johnson attempts to finagle his way round the problem, is an 11th-hour plot twist to savour.
      Joe Biden’s views on Brexit are well known. The president-elect judges it to be a damaging act of self-isolation; strategically unwise for Britain and unhelpful to American interests in Europe. But it is the impact of the UK’s departure from the EU on Ireland that concerns Mr Biden most. This autumn, he was forthright on the subject of the government’s controversial internal market bill, which was again debated on Monday in the House of Lords. The proposed legislation effectively reneges on a legally binding protocol signed with the EU, which would impose customs checks on goods travelling between Britain and Northern Ireland. In doing so, it summons up the spectre of a hard border on the island of Ireland, undermining the Good Friday agreement. Mr Biden is adamant that the GFA must not “become a casualty of Brexit”. He is expected to convey that message, in forceful terms, when his first telephone conversation with Mr Johnson eventually takes place.
      This is somewhat awkward for the prime minister. Mr Johnson badly needs to establish good relations with the new regime in Washington, ahead of crucial trade negotiations. In light of that, Mr Johnson may choose not to insist on the clauses relating to Northern Ireland when the bill goes back to the Commons. That would certainly be the wise move, although the noises coming from the government remain defiant. But the prime minister’s challenges in dealing with the coming regime change in Washington go well beyond Brexit.
      The personal dynamics between Mr Johnson and Mr Biden and his team are, to put it mildly, unpromising. The prime minister’s insulting remarks four years ago, about Barack Obama’s Kenyan ancestry, have not been forgotten. Mr Johnson seems to be viewed by many senior Democrats as a kind of pound-shop Donald Trump. There is also little regard for the consistency or sincerity with which Mr Johnson holds his views. At the weekend, when the prime minister instagrammed his congratulations to Mr Biden on his victory, a Biden ally witheringly referred to Mr Johnson as “this shape-shifting creep”.
      So in the race to make friends and influence people in the new Washington, Britain has the very opposite of a head start. The smart money is on Paris becoming the first European capital to receive President Biden. That reflects both good relations with Emmanuel Macron and a concern to rebuild diplomatic bridges, after four years in which Mr Trump rarely ceased to disparage and seek to undermine the EU. Mr Biden means to bring back a sense of diplomatic propriety and integrity to America’s relations with European friends and allies.
      Britain, having left the EU, cannot be a central player in this restoration project. But it can avoid making unforced errors. The government should urgently start to read the runes of new, more internationalist times. The politics of disruptive confrontation, as exemplified by the internal market bill, suddenly looks dangerously dated. When the Northern Ireland minister, Brandon Lewis, confirmed in September that the bill would break international law, senior Conservatives such as Sir Michael Howard and Theresa May expressed their dismay at the damage to Britain’s reputation that would result. They were ignored.
      But faced with an Irish-American president who is determined to rehabilitate relations with the EU, and is deeply suspicious of Mr Johnson’s Trumpian tendencies, to continue with the bill as it stands would be folly. With Mr Trump on his way out, Mr Johnson needs to sober up and start shifting some shapes on this and other matters. More

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      Donald Trump’s defeat is wonderful for the world and trouble for Boris Johnson | Andrew Rawnsley

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      Only Americans have a vote in their presidential election, but the whole world has a stake. Never more so has that been the case than in 2020. The planet has been mesmerised by the compelling theatre of American democracy and nowhere more so than the UK. Some here – all right, me – have become as transfixed as any American psephological nerd by voting patterns in Clayton County, Georgia.Not only does the winner occupy one of the most potent seats on the planet, America’s choice of president can set, confirm or reverse global ideological trends. Because of a common language, historical ties and political classes that interact a lot, the cross-currents across the Atlantic can be highly influential.America turned decisively to the right when it chose Ronald Reagan in 1980, doing so 18 months after Britain had executed a similar shift by electing Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher, so unpopular at the time that there was talk among Tories about removing her, was fortified and emboldened by the arrival of an ideological soulmate in the Oval Office. By taking the White House for the “New Democrats” in 1992, Bill Clinton provided ideas and inspiration for Tony Blair’s New Labour. During that decade, and to the consternation of rivals to both left and right, their “Third Way” style of politics swept through progressive parties from Brazil to Germany.The Brexit vote here in June 2016, our stark break with postwar history, was a harbinger of another great rupture, Donald Trump’s victory that November. This, in turn, energised nationalist populists around the planet and encouraged them to think that the future belonged to them. It contributed to the febrile climate in which the Tory party decided that a punt on another reckless gambler with startling blond hair and a record of mendacity was not as outlandish as it had previously seemed.There is already much rune-reading of the long-term reverberations of this US election. A clutch of conservative commentators and politicians gleefully notes that the Democrats failed to sweep all before them and conclude that leftwing “identity politics” has been quashed. Yet the larger failure is that of rightwing “culture war” politics whose ultra-bellicose and previously most successful champion has lost the US presidency by the thumping margin of more than 4m votes. A set of leftwing commentators and politicians has a converse explanation for why a “blue wave” did not materialise in sufficient strength to achieve control of both houses of Congress for the Democrats. On an account that glides over the fact that Joe Biden has actually won the presidency, they argue that the Democrats ought to have put up a more radically leftish candidate. Conveniently for proponents of this thesis, it compares an election that did happen with one that did not. What we do have experience of, and very recently, is what happened when a leftwing populist was pitted against a rightwing populist in another English-speaking democracy. You may recall that Labour was crushed by a landslide.The Trump presidency so despoiled the office that smirking authoritarians pointed to its hideous dysfunctionality to justify their dictatorshipIn a country that rarely denies a second term to the incumbent, Mr Trump’s defeat is a feat as extraordinary as it is welcome. Mr Biden’s victory contradicts the notion that we live in an era where it is fatal to be “the establishment” candidate, disabling to be a seasoned, thoughtful and temperate person and hopeless to be a consensus-seeking moderate. This was Mr Biden’s third run at the presidency, having been at the heart of Washington for decades. He will be 78 when he moves in to the White House. He vanquished Mr Trump not by offering himself as the leftwing mirror image of the incumbent, but by personifying a contrasting kind of political character. By both reputation and demeanour, he is a pragmatist and a unifier. “We always do better as one America,” was one of the signature lines of his campaign. No presidential candidate in American history has won with as many votes as the man his rival ridiculed as “Sleepy Joe”. He represents a revival of a kind of politics that many told us was deceased in the opening decades of the 21st century. It is a triumph for the centrist grandad.The first and most important consequence of President Biden is that he means the eviction of President Trump. Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency “a bully pulpit”, a description that has taken on a much more sinister meaning over the four years when the presidency was occupied by a thug. The imperative to defeat him was underlined by the manner of his losing. His televised rants attempted to subvert American democracy itself by spraying baseless claims that the presidency was being “stolen”. Mr Trump will still be around after January, a bad loser raving conspiracy theories, but he will no longer have that White House pulpit to bully from. This matters to much more than America. The Trump presidency so despoiled the office and undermined his country’s claim to the world’s respect that smirking authoritarians pointed to its hideous dysfunctionality to justify their dictatorships while liberal democracies lost their faith in American leadership. Where Mr Trump stoked polarisation at home and division abroad, Mr Biden will seek to build bridges, not walls.Barack Obama commended his vice-president to the American people on the grounds that they would no longer have to worry that their president would say or do something “crazy”. That is not a small point and it has relevance beyond America. The planet will no longer have to twitch over the US president’s Twitter feed.Mr Biden will seek to restore his country’s reputation as a trustworthy and predictable ally and recommit to international agreements that have been shredded by his predecessor. Most importantly, the US will re-engage with tackling a climate crisis that Mr Trump dismissed as a “hoax”. This reversion to an internationalist presidency will be broadly in our country’s interests. As a liberal democracy and an upper-middling power, the UK is best served by a rules-based global order rather than living in a rogue world where smaller countries are trampled underfoot by competing authoritarians.British officials predict that it will be much easier to work with Mr Biden, but the vanquishing of Mr Trump is unnerving for Boris Johnson. As I remarked a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of this result, it renders him more marginalised on the world stage. A president who yelled for Brexit will be replaced by a president who regards Mr Johnson’s defining policy as a feckless act of British self-harm that jeopardises the Good Friday agreement. The Tory leader, who has never met the next American president, has a lot of skilful diplomacy to perform if he is to convince the new administration that he is not a mini-Trump. Even if he can manage that, he will struggle to make the UK seem particularly relevant to a US administration that will prioritise reviving America’s relationships with the EU.Another peril for Mr Johnson is that he looks like the vendor of an ideological style that has been rejected in its largest market. Mr Trump will no longer be the most famous example of what some took to be an irresistible global trend of nationalist populism. It will become more common to see him as a shaming aberration in America’s modern history. John Quincy Adams, the sixth man to hold the office, observed: “There is nothing more pathetic than a former president.” Except – Mr Johnson might take note – the imitator of a rejected president.The Republican party is already beginning to debate how Trumpian its future should be and that argument will be reflected this side of the Atlantic. For more traditional Tories, the US election result demonstrates that entrusting their future to rightwing populism not only debases institutions and values that conservatives ought to hold precious, but also leads to an electoral dead end. Others on the right can be heard contending that, while Trump may have been defeated, Trumpism is far from exhausted as a force and a technique. While they start wrestling with what will be a long contention, some liberals are already fretting over whether Mr Biden will be able to achieve all that much when America is so deeply polarised and hyper-partisan.There will be time enough for angst. Today doesn’t have to be over-complicated. A complex election has delivered an unequivocal cause for pure and simple celebration. On 20 January next year, the current resident will be evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, under armed escort if he insists on that kind of exit, and we will no longer have to put Donald Trump in the same sentence as White House.• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer More

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      Johnson says he will not comment on Trump's call to stop counting US election votes – video

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      The prime minister sidestepped Keir Starmer’s attempt at PMQs to get him to comment on Donald Trump’s call to stop the counting of votes in the US election. Challenged by the Labour leader to agree that it was not the place of either candidate to decide which votes should count, Johnson said: ‘We don’t comment as the UK government on the democratic processes of our friends and allies’
      Boris Johnson refuses to comment on Trump’s call to stop vote-counting More

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      A Joe Biden White House will have little time and less love for ‘Britain’s Trump’ | Andrew Rawnsley

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      When the long race for the White House ends, another begins: the sprint to be the first European leader to be granted an audience by the new US president. In 2016, Theresa May was distraught to have got a wooden spoon in the competition to put in an early congratulatory telephone call to Trump Tower. That made her even more neuralgic about beating a path to Washington ahead of her European rivals. Mrs May had to throw in the promise of a Trump state visit to the UK – I rather rudely called it “pimping out the Queen” – to ensure that she got to the White House first.
      This desperation can make British prime ministers look pathetically needy, but there is a reason why they set so much store by displays of proximity with the Oval Office. How important a prime minister is to the United States, the planet’s largest economy and most potent military force, sends a message about how much influence the UK wields in the world. So it is telling that Number 10 is resigned to the prospect that Boris Johnson will not be the first name on Joe Biden’s call sheet if he becomes the 46th president. Nor is there any expectation that Mr Johnson will be first in line when they hand out invitations to the White House. He has already quit a race UK prime ministers are usually pretty good at winning.
      “There is an intrinsic problem for Boris,” observes Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK’s ambassador in Washington during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W Bush. “The Democrats think Boris is a pea from the same pod as Trump.” Being “Britain’s Trump” goes down almost as poisonously as being Trump himself among many in Team Biden. They are bracketed together in the minds of Democrats not just because both are rule-breaking populists who have polarised their countries and trashed historic alliances. Likely members of a Biden administration remember examples of the Tory leader’s insultingly Trumpian behaviour. Ben Rhodes, who was deputy national security adviser when Mr Biden was vice-president to Barack Obama, has remarked: “I’m old enough to remember when Boris Johnson said Obama opposed Brexit because he was Kenyan.” A more recent inflammatory episode exposed a complete absence of thought in Number 10 about the man whom the polls suggest will be the next US president.
      One of the most essential things to know about Mr Biden – it would be on the first page if anyone wrote a book called Biden for Beginners – is that he is a Catholic who is extremely proud of his Irish ancestry. Mr Johnson was either blithe or ignorant about that when he declared that he was ready to break international law by dishonouring clauses concerning Ireland in the withdrawal agreement with the EU. Mr Biden was one of the voices in the chorus of American condemnation that the Johnson government was jeopardising the Good Friday agreement. “That was profoundly clumsy and stupid,” says Sir Chris. “It immediately ignited the Irish-American lobby in Washington, which is second in power only to the pro-Israeli lobby.”
      Mr Johnson can be quite adept at shape-shifting when he thinks it suits his interests. He was a liberal mayor of London before he became the face of the anti-immigrant Brexit campaign. Confronted with a Democrat in the White House, he may try to slough off his Trumpian skin and offer himself as a useful partner for an internationalist president. For his part, Mr Biden will say that America’s ties with the UK are important to him, if only because that is what all American presidents say. It is nevertheless set to start out as one of the frostiest relationships between Number 10 and the White House since Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
      Though Mr Biden has been a large figure in US politics for decades, one well-placed observer says that Number 10 is “absolutely clueless” about him and his key people. In the past, it has been usual for the Washington embassy to attach a diplomat to the campaigns of presidential candidates, the better to get to know their teams and likely priorities in office. Wary of any suggestion of outside interference in the US election, the Biden team banned meetings with foreign diplomats. Downing Street has found it hard to find other ways to establish connections. Previous Tory governments had good lines of communication to both parties in the US. This Brexiter-dominated cabinet has cultivated ties solely with Republicans. It was only very recently and very belatedly that Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, managed to get some time with Biden allies on Capitol Hill. If they were smarter, the Johnson government would also have paid a lot of attention to Mr Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, because she will be a 77-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency.
      Even if a Biden administration decides to let bygones be bygones, the Johnson government will still struggle to make itself relevant in Washington. After a Trump presidency that has massively strained America’s historic alliances while often fawning to authoritarians, a Biden presidency will try to reassert US leadership of the world’s democracies. A critical feature of that will be detraumatising the transatlantic relationship. At a recent Ditchley conference of foreign policy experts from America, Britain and elsewhere, one question that preoccupied the gathering was who would become Mr Biden’s “special friend” in Europe. Emmanuel Macron is very eager to secure that status, though others familiar with thinking among the Biden team believe that their highest priority will be re-establishing strong relations with Germany. Almost no one expects the UK to have preferred partnership status.
      After the huge distress to European leaders of enduring a US president who willed the breakup of the European Union, a Biden administration will revert to something much closer to America’s traditional post-1945 policy. Namely that US interests are best served by Europe being stable and cohesive. Having severed its central bond with its neighbours, the UK can no longer hope to offer itself to Washington as America’s bridge across the Atlantic.
      Searching for areas where the relationship could still be close, some emphasise “the hard security issues” – military co-operation, counter-terrorism and intelligence – where there are mutual interests that have historically transcended the personalities of leaders. “When the Americans are looking for military help, they ask who are our allies and what have they got?” says one senior Tory who thinks this still matters. But Johnson government officials sound rather desperate when they try to talk up the importance of the UK’s much-reduced military heft. Mr Biden is not planning any wars and, even if he were, the United States can act without the help of Britain.
      The biggest foreign policy challenge of the Biden presidency will be managing his country’s tense strategic competition with China while avoiding a deterioration into armed confrontation. Britain’s ability to be of use to Washington in that sphere is limited because our capacity to apply meaningful pressure on China is not high. The UK government has protested in vain about China’s treatment of Hong Kong.
      Downing Street also sounds as if it is clutching at very feeble straws when it suggests that there will be an opportunity to win favour next year when Britain hosts the UN climate change conference. Mr Biden is not exactly a summit novice and his team have clocked that Britain was mealymouthed when Mr Trump ripped up American commitments to tackling the climate crisis.
      There are compelling reasons why a change at the White House ought to unnerve Mr Johnson. The Trump presidency emboldens populist nationalists around the world by encouraging them to believe that they are part of an irresistibly triumphant global trend. Defeat for him will give his one term in office more the character of a freakish spasm and leave imitators looking like purveyors of an ideological style that is going out of fashion.
      During the Trump period, Mr Johnson has tried to lever influence with other leaders by presenting himself as the man who has the ear of, and can help to interpret, the White House wild man. “Boris Johnson sold himself as the Trump whisperer,” says Jonathan Powell, a diplomat in Washington before he became Tony Blair’s chief of staff. “Without Trump, what is the point of Johnson?” More existentially, the British may ask themselves where his policies have left this country other than looking alone in a dangerous world. Brexit has fractured the relationship with Europe, one pillar of the postwar foreign policy. Now it looks highly likely that the other pillar, a close relationship with the US, will be shuddering.
      • Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer More

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      We’re endlessly told why populism works. Now see how it might fail | Nick Cohen

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      We have heard lectures on why radical rightwing movements win for what feels like an age. A more pressing subject gains less attention. Like catching a glimpse of the path from a dangerous mountain when the mist parts, we can begin to see how they may lose.When liberals treat their enemies as evil geniuses, they bestow a backhanded compliment. They imply that, however wicked it may be, the right has a supernatural power to manipulate the electorate and rig the system. Donald Trump is many things, but he’s no genius, evil or otherwise. If Trump were a beggar screaming at passersby on a Washington sidewalk, rather than a billionaire in the White House, we would have no difficulty in saying he was mentally ill. I accept Boris Johnson has the superficial charm and rat-like cunning of the journalist-conman. But if he were a political mastermind, he would never have confirmed the deep suspicion of northern voters that southern snobs view them with contempt.One day, their obituaries may record that Trump and Johnson destroyed the base of their support without realising they were doing it; that they no more understood the forces that brought them to power than plastic sheeting blowing down a street understands the wind.Johnson’s failure to protect the British is equal to Trump’s failure to protect Americans, as the death rates showAge does not bring wisdom and before it is anything else Trump and Johnson’s base is old. Sixty per cent of voters over 65 supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum. American pensioners preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton 53%-45% in the 2016 presidential election. You don’t need me to tell you that Covid-19 targets the old. And you don’t need to be a genius to know that politicians shouldn’t give their supporters the impression they are happy to see them die. Trump’s failure to get a grip on the pandemic and the Republican party’s dismissal of basic health protections gives exactly that impression. Joe Biden can now tell old, white voters, whose backing Trump could once have counted on: “You’re expendable, you’re forgettable, you’re virtually nobody. That’s how he sees seniors. That’s how he sees you.”US polls bear out the staggering political insight that voters don’t want to die by showing that Biden has taken a substantial lead among pensioners. Far from making the clever choice and downplaying an issue that only harms him, Trump reveals his compulsive narcissism by refusing to let Covid-19 go. Moving on to talk about, say, the economy would entail accepting that he was in the wrong about the pandemic. Rather than bite his tongue, last week he was ridiculing the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, whom Trump loathes for the childish reason that Americans trust his medical advice more than they trust Trump.Johnson’s failure to protect the British is equal to Trump’s failure to protect Americans, as the near-identical per capita death rates show. Johnson is also displaying Trumpian levels of political ineptitude, although the reason for his blundering is different. If Trump is driven by a narcissistic compulsion, Johnson is driven by power hunger.Not a single cabinet minister visited Manchester to make the government’s casePerhaps you have to be from the north of England to understand the suicidal politics of behaving as if the south can humiliate the north. I moved away from Manchester in the 1980s and even I found myself overcome by volcanic rage as ministers issued ultimatums that Manchester must accept the government’s miserly Covid-19 relief or pay the price. Johnson’s behaviour is incomprehensible because he knows the power of northern resentment. Since the Brexit referendum, the right has spun the story that elitist Remainers, lounging in their Islington ivory towers, had the nerve to denounce honest northerners as “thick” for backing Leave. The opinion pages of the Daily Telegraph have been filled with little else these past four years.Exploiting anti-metropolitan feeling helped the Conservatives win. Now northern Labour politicians can turn the years of physical and economic suffering that coronavirus will bring into the story of how Westminster’s Tory elite refused to treat the north with common decency. The Manchester Evening News’s Jennifer Williams wrote of her incredulity that, as reports of Tories refusing the support the north needed cut through to such an extent that pubs were offering free pints to Andy Burnham, not a single cabinet minister visited Manchester to make the government’s case. Perhaps it isn’t such a puzzle. This government hates and wants to crush anyone who argues back: judges, broadcasters, civil servants, regional mayors. When the mayor of Greater Manchester stood up for his region, the right’s hatred of a rival source of power blinded it to the danger of confirming every northern suspicion about the south.A deterministic explanation of contemporary society has taken a deep hold. The corruption and incompetence of governments do not matter, we are told. The material reality of whether you have a job or are unemployed, whether you expect to live or die, no longer determines how you vote. If you went to university, you back the left. If you didn’t, you back the right. Or so the story goes. Johnson can break his promises about Brexit bringing a new dawn. Trump can break his promises about fighting for working-class Americans. It doesn’t matter. Trump’s boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” encapsulates our age.If Trump wins, the cultural determinists will be vindicated. If he does not, however, the reasons for his defeat won’t be a mystery. Astonished US journalists won’t be wondering how to explain it. They will know that, far from helping him, Trump’s vicious culture war politics alienated white women, who came to find him repulsive, and his mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis alienated elderly people and many others besides.Northern Labour politicians I speak to still believe that Corbyn and the far left gifted the Conservatives another 10 years in 2019. But even they are wavering now and, like lost walkers when the mist parts on the fells, are catching the faintest glimpse of a way through the murk.• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist More

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      How will the election affect US relations with allies?: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As reports suggest that No 10 Downing Street has been preparing for Trump’s exit from the White House, Jonathan Freedland and Rafael Behr look at how the election might affect America’s relationship with the rest of the world

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      At the weekend, we saw reports that No 10 Downing Street has concluded that Donald Trump is going to lose the US presidential election (paywall) and that it’s time to cosy up to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. The story had Jonathan Freedland thinking: “How will the US election affect America’s relationship with the rest of the world?” How will leaders who have enjoyed Trump’s approach to international diplomacy adapt if Joe Biden takes office? And for American allies who have failed to warm to the president, could another four years of Trump take ties that have already been frayed and snap them altogether? Here to help him try to answer all that is Guardian columnist Rafael Behr. Buy tickets for the Guardian Live Event, where Jonathan Freedland and others will be discussing the upcoming election. Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More