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      No 10 takes relaxed view as Biden removes Churchill bust from Oval Office

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      Downing Street has said it is up to Joe Biden how he decorates the Oval Office, after it was reported that a bust of Winston Churchill, lent by the UK government, has been removed.
      “The Oval Office is the president’s private office, and it’s up to the president to decorate it as he wishes,” Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said, adding: “We’re in no doubt about the importance President Biden places on the UK-US relationship, and the prime minister looks forward to having that close relationship with him.”
      Johnson’s relaxed attitude is in marked contrast to his criticism of Barack Obama, when the former president moved the Churchill bust aside.
      Writing in the Sun in 2016, Johnson, then London mayor, and the author of a Churchill biography, called Obama’s decision a “snub,” suggesting it may have been because of “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.
      A bust of Mexican American labour rights leader Cesar Chavez was visible in pictures of Biden signing executive orders on Wednesday.
      The prime minister, who was referred to by Donald Trump when he was president as “Britain Trump”, is keen to strike up a strong working relationship with the socially liberal Biden, who the government hopes will attend the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June.
      Johnson’s spokesman was forced to field a string of questions about whether Johnson is “woke”, after the shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, described Biden as a “woke guy,” referring to his support for Black Lives Matter and trans rights.
      Asked about her comments on Wednesday, Johnson appeared uncomfortable, before remarking that there was, “nothing wrong with being woke”.
      When the prime minister’s spokesman was asked whether Johnson would consider himself “woke”, he said: “You would have to define that, but you’ve got the PM’s views on what he believes, and specifically on his agenda to level up across the country, and ensure that everybody has the opportunity to succeed.”
      The Conservatives believe publicly rejecting socially liberal policies such as the removal of historic statues with colonial connections will help them to score points over Labour.
      The communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, has said he will legislate to prevent historic statues being removed, “at the hand of the flash mob” or by a “cultural committee of town hall militants and woke worthies”.
      Graphic
      Johnson’s remarks about Obama, made during the buildup to the Brexit referendum, caused a furore. It subsequently emerged that Obama had simply moved the bust of the wartime leader – a loan from the UK government – to a spot in his personal residence.
      When Theresa May rushed to Washington in early 2017 to be the first world leader to visit Trump in the White House, he swept her into the Oval Office to show that Churchill had been restored to prominence. More

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      in UK Politics

      Inside Politics: Boris Johnson’s government accused of Brexit fairy tales

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      An idyllic Wiltshire village made famous by the Harry Potter films is getting swamped with visitors – despite the lockdown. Some have openly admitted they’re breaking the rules for daytrips, enjoying a brief suspension of reality in a dreamy English fantasyland. Cabinet minister Brandon Lewis has been accused of fantasyland politics after his suspension-from-reality claim that Brexit isn’t to blame for supply disruption. However hard Boris Johnson and his ministers try to wish away the chaos with the magical phrase “teething problems”, the spell just isn’t working.Inside the bubbleOur political commentator Andrew Grice on what to look out for today: More

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      Inflated ego: Trump baby blimp joins Museum of London collection

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      The the Donald Trump baby blimp, a 6-metre-high inflatable caricature that became a symbol of UK protest against the US president, has secured its place in history at a leading museum.The helium-filled balloon, paid for through crowdfunding, depicts the outgoing president as a snarling orange baby wearing a nappy, with its tiny hands clutching a smartphone. It first took to the skies above Parliament Square during protests over Trump’s first presidential visit to the UK in 2018.It was present again on his state visit in 2019, and has also been flown in France, Argentina, Ireland, Denmark and various locations in the US.Now, after a global tour, the Trump baby, designed by Matt Bonner, and constructed by Imagine Inflatables of Leicester, has been acquired by the Museum of London. It will be conserved and could be displayed as part of the museum’s protest collection, which includes artefacts from the Suffragette movement, climate-crisis rallies and peace activism.The creators of the effigy said they hoped it served as a reminder of the fight against the “politics of hate”.“While we’re pleased that the Trump baby can now be consigned to history along with the man himself, we’re under no illusions that this is the end of the story,” they said in a statement to PA Media.“We hope the baby’s place in the museum will stand as a reminder of when London stood against Mr Trump – but will prompt those who see it to examine how they can continue the fight against the politics of hate.“Most of all, we hope the Trump baby serves as a reminder of the politics of resistance that took place during Trump’s time in office.”On the blimp’s first outing in 2018, Nigel Farage called it “the biggest insult to a sitting US president ever”. Trump himself said: “I guess when they put out blimps to make me feel unwelcome, no reason for me to go to London.”Sharon Ament, the director of the Museum of London, said: “Of course the museum is not political, and does not have any view about the state of politics in the States.” But the blimp touched on a typical British response, she said: satire. “We use humour a lot. And we poke fun at politicians. This is a big – literally – example of that.”The blimp had just arrived at the museum, she said, squashed into a suitcase. “It is timely, because it’s coming to us in the final days of President Trump being President Trump … the most ironic and fitting thing now is that it’s currently in quarantine in the museum. All objects have to be put into quarantine before they go into the collection because they could have insects.”The museum is a fitting home for the effigy, which is “a response from Londoners”, she said. “It was born in London … it was an extraordinary and imaginative idea.”“This large inflatable was just a tiny part of a global movement,” said the blimp’s creators. “A movement that was led by the marginalised people who Trump’s politics most endangered – and whose role in this moment should never be underestimated.” More

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      As Johnson finally condemns Trump, Britain should examine its own shift to the right | Nesrine Malik

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      The writer Alistair Cooke once observed: “As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.” That is a kind way of saying that the British are always a few years behind the Americans, emulating them and then pretending that we came up with whatever it is we are mimicking, or coming up with a uniquely British version of it.For example, Britain’s allegedly evidence-based involvement in the Iraq war was largely – as President George W Bush wrote in an internal memo months before military action – a matter of it following the US’s lead. So much of the special relationship between the two countries hinges on this keeping up of appearances, where the British political classes – who like to maintain their nation is the superior of the two, the original superpower – can admire and obey while holding on to the fiction that the UK is a more restrained country, less prone to the excesses of the other.Margaret Thatcher hit both of these notes, fawning over the US president, Ronald Reagan, when she said that they both “had almost identical beliefs” even though they were from “very different backgrounds”. And on her first visit to the White House, she said that the two countries were “inextricably entwined” because George Washington himself “was a British subject until well after his 40th birthday”.But then Donald Trump became president and upset this taut balance of adulation and snootiness. He publicly flaunted the influence over Britain that had always been wielded in secret, humiliated Theresa May, insulted London mayor Sadiq Khan, and took a swipe at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. He flourished the power and vulgarity of the US without any of its refining rhetoric or protocol. And the country he presided over became not just one of inelegant indulgence but a darker place where white supremacists, backed by the White House itself, marched in the streets.With that erosion of reputation, Trump’s America has gained a new utility for the British: it is not a place that Britain secretly looks up to, but a place that Britain is unlike; a place that demonstrates why things over here are not to be compared with how bad it is over there. A country that is struggling with its demons, and which we observe from a safe distance while lamenting its decline.Whether it’s the US’s culture wars, its race crisis or its succumbing to far-right politics and white supremacy, these are things that do not map neatly on to Britain’s faultlines. Poor America, the country we no longer share beliefs or an inextricably entwined history with.The distancing began in earnest in the summer of Black Lives Matter, but the storming of the Capitol was the final dividing line. Boris Johnson was appalled at the “disgraceful scenes” and “unreservedly” condemned Trump’s incitement of the crowd, even though he had little to say when Trump was building momentum for the insurrection in the preceding weeks.The prime minister’s transition from spectating to actively condemning was in part because the scenes in Washington DC were simply too shocking to be silent on. But the more important factor is that Trump is on the way out. He can be repudiated with no risk of blowback or diplomatic crisis. Had the events at the Capitol happened in the middle of Trump’s term in office, I would wager that much of the scrambling to denounce, from Twitter to Johnson, would have been absent.And so again, circumstances help the UK to distance itself, pretend it was not complicit in Trump’s ascendancy, that there was no aiding and abetting of the president and his extremist supporters (despite refusing to condemn his Muslim flight ban, and rolling out “the reddest of red carpets” for him). The scenes at the Capitol serve a useful purpose, which is to overshadow the path that led to the steps of the building: with images so vivid and rich, and with so many colourful characters, we become preoccupied with their detail and fail to see all the arteries that nourished them.The insurrection was just one point on a continuum that involves not just Trump and the Republican party, but an entire hinterland of conservative politics. It includes those in Congress who didn’t quite disavow Trump, and respectable conservative pundits who, even if they repudiated the president’s most extreme acts, still played on his themes, such as the conspiring leftwing elite who hate the “real America”. The connective tissue between Trump and the white supremacist on the street is much more fibrous than it serves many to admit.In the UK we are prone to the same impulses of denial – using the high-octane events of the past few weeks to claim that a difference in degree means all the difference in the world. The reality is that, even though our parliament wasn’t stormed, British members of parliament were jostled and abused on their way to work by hardcore Brexit supporters. One of those MPs was assassinated by a far-right nationalist. Another almost was.Britain’s culture war is so potent that we have our own mobs scuffling with the police, responding to the dog whistles of our own government. We have respectable sections in the media who pump out conspiratorial theories about the woke and the elite, and now preach against mask-wearing and lockdowns. When the far right spills out on to the streets, claiming lives and attacking democracies, it’s the result of a million compounded complicities and complacencies. Like a jigsaw, when these details come together they create a larger image. Today that image is Donald Trump. When he is gone, the jigsaw will be broken up again and both the US and the UK will choose not to see what together those pieces can create. More

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      in US Politics

      Oh see how the Tories now run from Donald Trump | Stewart Lee

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      In 2019, Jeremy Hunt, who once hid behind a tree to avoid the press on the way to a party, said politicians boycotting Donald Trump’s state visit were exhibiting “virtue signalling of the worst kind”. Was Hunt also virtue signalling last week, then, when he conceded that Trump “shames American democracy”? Or have the goalposts, already too narrow for even the slender Hunt to hide behind convincingly, moved?Trump himself once called our prime minister, Boris Turds Johnson, “Britain Trump”, with characteristically unpunctuated precision. In the light of Trump’s inevitable immolation of American democracy, Turds’s handlers now seek to distance our prime minister from his admirer, every white supremacist’s favourite reality TV host. Last week, the Times ran an article, headlined “Johnson is not Trump’s transatlantic twin”, by the Spectator’s James Forsyth, whose wife, Allegra Stratton, is Downing Street’s press secretary and whose principles are above question. Once the journal of record, it seems the Times is now the journal of whatever Downing Street’s press secretary wants the record to say. And there are efforts afoot to rewrite that record.Celebrities’ photo albums have long been cleansed of pictures of lighthearted moments shared at charity fun runs with Jimmy Savile. And I have destroyed both the Super-8 films and the doodles of the woeful 36 hours I and the Australian standup comedian Greg Fleet spent in the Flinders mountains, north of Adelaide, in 1997, feasting with regret on the flesh of the tragic victims of a light aircraft crash that we alone had survived.But our politicians’ historic fondness for President Exploding Tangerine Hitler will be harder to forget. There’s no need to deploy the deep fake technology or distorting social media of the Tories’ last election campaign to find a photo of America’s self-styled Mr Brexit posing in his Liberace’s lavatory lift with a clearly engorged Nigel Farage and his Ukip, Breitbart and Leave.EU colleagues. It’s there as plain as the nostrils on Michael Gove’s nose. But Farage’s friends weren’t alone in bending Trump’s brain farts to their own agendas and appeasing his own special brand of home-fried fascism.Farage’s friends weren’t alone in bending Trump’s brain farts to their own agendasIn January 2017, a delighted Michael Gove became the first British journalist to visit the “warm and charismatic” new American president. Gove was even accompanied by Rupert Murdoch, a fact he chose to hide in his subsequent BBC interview and newspaper article, where he propagated Trump’s Nato lies unchecked. Gove described ascending the phallocratic Trump Tower in a golden lift, “operated by an immensely dignified African American attendant kitted out in frock coat and white gloves. It was as though the Great Glass Elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had been restyled by Donatella Versace, then staffed by the casting director for Gone With the Wind.” Charlie and the smooth glass surfaces, working as a team!Two-faced Gove’s frivolous tone, suffused nonetheless with a strange strain of snobbery, attempts to socially distance himself from Trump’s lowbrow idea of luxury, while simultaneously revelling in the proximity of such immense wealth, however garish its elevator, however dignified its African American. But Gove emerged from the summit holding in his hand a piece of paper promising Trump would facilitate Brexit by doing “a trade deal with the UK absolutely, very quickly”. Gove is the Neville Chamberlain of nowhere. Where is your chlorinated chicken now, Brexiter? For I have in my hand Joe Biden’s souvenir Irish shillelagh, a confiscated lorry driver’s ham and cheese sandwich and a space where some M&S Percy Pigs should have been.I wonder if Gove recalled the enjoyable afternoon he spent squatting on top of Trump’s enormous golden shaft of power when watching another immensely dignified African American, this time a government security guard, being chased up the stairwell of the Senate by a mob of Confederate-flag-waving Trump supporters wearing T-shirts celebrating the Holocaust with the Nazi death camp motto “Work brings freedom”. As Gove might have written, it was as though the Singin’ in the Rain scene from A Clockwork Orange had been restyled by Charles Manson then staffed by the casting director of The Hills Have Eyes. Oh! The charisma!!!Turds got off to a better start than Gove in his approach to Trump, declaring in 2015 that the pussy-grabbing humanity-tumour was “clearly out of his mind” and a man of “quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president of the United States”. Back then, Turds, who has no actual discernible values beyond steamy ambition and refrigerated cowardice, was mayor of London. And Mayor Turds was playing to the focaccia gallery of the Trump-loathing London liberal elite, who fell one by one for his cheeky Have I Got News For You persona like a succession of statues of slavers in a Bristol dock. Once Trump was president, Turds simply tried on a new opinion, discarding the conviction-filled prophylactic of his spaffed beliefs like the condoms he obviously never wears.By January 2017, Turds, who himself compared the EU trading block to the Nazis innumerable times in print, condemned critics of his new “friend and partner” for “trivialising the Holocaust” by comparing Trump to Hitler, subsequently saying that the president deserved the Nobel peace prize. But the trajectory of Trump’s rise to date mirrors that of Hitler’s, albeit a bright-orange Hitler with an undying fondness for disco hits. And Johnson himself has not been above weaponising fabricated culture wars, from the Proms to slavers’ statues while ridiculing “Romanian vampires” and “tank-topped bumboys”, to court the support of the worst people in Britain. Turds’s apparent ignorance of Hitler’s rise is inexcusable, especially as most cable channels are devoted entirely to endless loops of documentaries about him. Maybe Turds needs to brush up on how a populist leader could dehumanise minorities and liberals to gain power. But, worryingly, I suspect Turds already did that a few years ago.King Rocker, a film about the Birmingham post-punk band the Nightingales, by Stewart Lee and Michael Cumming, premiers on free to air Sky Arts on Saturday 6 February at 9pm. Watch the trailer here More

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      in US Politics

      If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is one | Nick Cohen

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      Assurances that “fascism couldn’t happen here” are always appealing in Anglo-Saxon countries that think themselves immune because “it” never did. The US and UK did not experience rule by Nazism or communism in the 20th century and the ignorance our lucky histories fostered has weakened our defences in the 21st.Even after all that has happened in Washington, apparently serious voices insist we cannot compare Donald Trump to any variety of fascist. Conservatives habitually say that liberals call everything they don’t like fascist, forgetting that the moral of Aesop’s fable was that the boy who cried wolf was right in the end. They used to chortle about “Trump derangement syndrome” that spreads in stages like cancer until sufferers “cannot distinguish fantasy from reality”. They have bitten their tongues now that the reality of Trumpism is deranged mobs trying to overthrow democracy.Their silence was broken last week by the historian of Nazism, Richard Evans, who with the effortless ability to miss every point a professorship at Cambridge bestows, decided now was the moment to denounce his colleagues, Timothy Snyder and Sarah Churchwell. They might compare the Trump and fascist movements but “few who have described Trump as a fascist can be called real experts in the field”, he wrote in the New Statesman with an audible sniff. “Genuine specialists”, such as, and since you asked, himself, “agree that whatever else he is, Trump is not a fascist”.Before we get to why the argument matters, I should say the New Statesman needs to expand its fact-checking department. Snyder, whose work on how democracies turn into dictatorships is essential reading, does not say that the Trump movement is “fascist”. He writes that “post-truth is pre-fascism and Trump has been our post-truth president”. Churchwell’s astonishing studies of how German Nazis and American white supremacists fed off each other are a revelation. (And I come from the old left and thought I had learned about everything that was rotten with America at my mother’s knee.) When asked, she says she too is careful and characterises the Trump movement as “neo-fascist”.The use of “fascism” in political debate is both a call to arms and a declaration of war. For once you say you are fighting fascism there can be no retreat. By talking of “pre-fascism” or “neo-fascism”, you acknowledge that the F-word is not a bomb you should detonate lightly; you also acknowledge the gravity of the times.The alternatives look like the euphemisms of formerly safe societies that, like Caliban, cannot bear to see their face in the mirror. The Trump leadership cult, the attacks on any source of information the leader does not authorise, the racist conspiracy theories, the servile media that amplify the leader’s lies are not “conservative” in any understanding of the term. How about populist? If it means anything today, populism is supporting the people against the elite. But what could be more elitist than denying the result of the people’s vote with the big lie, the Joseph Goebbels lie, that Trump won the election he lost and then inciting brainwashed followers to storm democratic institutions? Followers, I should add, who included men dressed in “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts and waving Confederate flags and wannabe stormtroopers crying “sieg heil!” and “total negro death”. “Far right” and “extreme right” are no help. They are just polite ways of saying neo-fascist.In his The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton, the pre-eminent authority on its ideology, wrote that the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 rather than Mussolini’s squadristi in 1920 could be seen as the first fascist movement. As with the Nazi party, the embittered officers of a defeated army formed the Klan. They mourned the defeat of the Confederacy and did not accept the legitimacy of the US government. They had uniforms, white robes rather than leather jackets, the fantasies of racial supremacy and deployed terror to maintain the subjugation of African Americans. Last week, police sources told the Washington Post they were shocked to see “former law enforcement and military personnel as well as senior business executives” among the Washington mob. If they had known the history of military and bourgeois support for fascism, they would have been less surprised. It isn’t always powered by “the left behind”.Paxton said last week that he had “resisted for a long time applying the fascist label to Donald J Trump”, but Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label”.Republicans fear assassination if they vote to impeach Trump. Rupert Murdoch’s broadcasters are delivering barely veiled threats of violent insurrection if the Democrats pursue impeachment. “We see what’s happening around this country, how 50 state houses are being threatened on Inauguration Day,” warned one. “This is the last thing you want to do.” I can see three objections to calling a large section of the Republican party pre-fascist. The first can be dismissed with a flick of the fingers as it comes from a self-interested right that has to pretend it is not in the grip of a deep sickness – and not only in the United States. The second is the old soothing “it can’t happen here” exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon west, which has yet to learn that the US and UK are exceptional in the 21st century for all the wrong reasons. The third sounds intelligent but is the dumbest of all. You should not call Trump or any other leader a pre- or neo-fascist or any kind of fascist until he has gone the whole hog and transformed his society into a totalitarian war machine.The example of the stages of cancer, so beloved by believers in Trump derangement syndrome, explains the stupidity. Imagine you are a doctor looking at pre-cancerous cells or an early-stage cancer that has not grown deeply into tissue. The door bursts open and a chorus of Fox News presenters and Cambridge dons cry that “real experts in the field” agree that on no account should you call it cancer until it has metastasised and spread through the whole body. A competent doctor would insist on calling a fatal disease by its real name and not leave treatment until it was too late to stop it. So should you.• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist More

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      in US Politics

      'Kind of unbelievable': US Republicans in Britain mull over Trump impact

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      Watching history unfold in Washington DC from her home in London, Jan Halper-Hayes admitted to being slightly incredulous about the images of Donald Trump supporters storming the US Capitol.“It was kind of in some ways unbelievable,” says the long-term activist in the Republican party and former vice-president of its UK branch. She claims she has received “good information” to indicate that “Antifa people” were present at the riot.The unsubstantiated claim that Antifa – a catch-all term used by the president and others to describe anti-Trump protest movements – had infiltrated the mob is one that some of his most die-hard supporters have clung to.That the idea has made the leap across the Atlantic underlines how the Republican diaspora have not been immune to some of the bitter controversies splitting the party in its homeland.In the UK, the Trump presidency has taken something of a toll on the local branch of Republicans Overseas, which largely operates as a social circle for expatriate supporters who organise a 4th July party each year and carry out voter registration.Some members, and particularly young women, previously involved with the group have stepped away since the president’s 2016 election and, in some cases, even voted for Joe Biden. Halper-Hayes, a former member of Trump’s White House transition team and visitor to his Mar-a-Lago resort, remains loyal nevertheless, insisting that it has never been hard to square support for Trump with traditional Republican values.“I knew him when I lived in New York, so I have known him through all his iterations. I was on his transition team, and from encounters and observations I can tell you that he is so friendly and funny. It’s a shame that he used Twitter for a nasty side because that’s not who he really is.“Whether I am in an Uber car or in a supermarket, people love Trump here in the UK. It’s the BBC and the Guardian that take on a different mainstream media narrative.”Molly Kiniry has a very different take on Trump. She watched his rise both within the party and in national US politics with what she says was “increasing amounts of horror”. She views his most recent conduct as “a manifestation of the mental instability that has been there all along”.Not that being a Republican supporter in an often left-leaning city like London was ever without complexities. “What I normally say when people express surprise that I’m a Republican is something to the effect of ‘I am, I just hide the horns very well’.”Casting her US presidential vote for Joe Biden this time came easily, says Kiniry, a former spokesperson for Republicans Overseas UK and now a graduate student at Cambridge who acknowledges that the president and his loyalists would likely regard her as a Rino [Republican in name only].Like others, she says she is looking forward to her party regaining its traditional identity. She remains optimistic. “I don’t think I would still be a registered Republican after the last five or six years if that was not the case.”She is withering about those who have stood by the president in the US seat of power and, as a native Washingtonian, admits that the destructive events in DC had cut deep. “I think the members who did not vote to impeach the president will have to answer to voters, and to history as well, quite frankly.”A third view of sorts is espoused by Greg Swenson, a spokesperson for Republicans Overseas, who insists that Trump managed to win over him and others who had originally wanted someone else to be the party’s 2016 candidate. It was notable today that the majority of the UK branch’s board were women, he says. “I criticised him, but I can say that I have been very happy with what he did.”As an investment banker, he was attracted in particular to Trump’s stewardship of the US economy. “I became more of a supporter as we saw the results, for example, of tax deregulation, but it was also the massive pushback against him from Democrats and the left. As they became more unhinged, the more dug in Trump supporters have become.”That said, Swenson confesses that he is relishing a spell “in opposition” after four years defending a president who, he concedes, “finally overdid it”. He adds: “Trump fatigue is exhausting for every one, whether they are supporters or opponents – so I’m kind of looking forward to it.” More

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      in UK Politics

      Introduce two weeks’ paid bereavement leave, MPs tell ministers

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      Ministers are facing calls to introduce a minimum of two weeks’ paid bereavement leave following the death of a close relative or partner.
      A coalition of MPs, business chiefs and charities have called for the measure in the face of the mounting Covid-19 death toll.The government has so far been reluctant to introduce statutory bereavement leave.   More