Trump and Johnson don’t need to downplay their relationship, we all know Britain will be US territory in a matter of days

If Boris Johnson ever erred in his analysis of Donald Trump, the fault lay in being too harsh.

Yup, with the Nato summit bringing the terracotta Kraken to town, it’s time once again to juxtapose old quotes with the newly minted in the hope of alighting on some of those weeny contradictions the vulgar prefer to call whoppers.

It isn’t a difficult game to play, and since it inevitably confirms what everyone was sick of knowing long ago, there isn’t much point in playing it. Still, it just about makes the cut as comic relief.

The quote that most aggressively seizes the attention today isn’t Trump’s denial of knowing Prince Andrew, despite the familiar pleasure of seeing the denial paired with merry snapshots of the two together.

It isn’t his mystification about the source of the rumour that he wants to get those delicate little mitts on the NHS (the source, needless to add, being himself).

It isn’t even his disavowal of the madcap notion that he would dream of interfering in an election between Johnson (“very capable,” as he put it today, “…he will do a good job”) and Jeremy Corbyn (“So bad for your country, he’d be so bad, he’d take you on such a bad way,” as he recently informed his colonic tenant, Nigel Farage).

The quote that screams a decibel louder than the rest isn’t even from the ruby lips of the unified heavyweight champion of global political lying. It came from his sparring partner, protege, and likely eventual challenger, the prime minister.

“When Donald Trump says there are parts of London that are no-go areas,” Johnson chuntered in 2016, during a transatlantic exchange of views concerning the Muslim ban, “I think he’s betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States.”

Even if you agree with the conclusion, try to accept that the first part of the statement requires an apology.

Contrary to Johnson’s claim, there is a no-go area in London, and it is one from which Trump himself is excluded. It’s a small, gated road in SW1 which happens to house the UK prime minister.

For decades, photo ops with a sitting American president have been the wettest public relations dream for each and every PM. This was particularly so when the incumbents were mirror images of each other, as they have so often been: Thatcher and Reagan (free-market buccaneers), Major and Bush the Elder (stolid grey men), Blair and Clinton (slimy lawyers), Blair and Bush the Younger (neo-imperial warmongers).

Today, the officeholders are virtually the same person in every detail, from birthplace (New York) to girth, hair, sexual mores, number of children (guessing there, obviously, with at least one of them), entitlement, instant gratification, narcissism, disdain for basic democratic precepts, truanting from investigations into grotesque conflicts of interest, propensity for gibbering like a chimpanzee on mescaline, loyalty, decency and honesty.

Johnson is astonishingly close to how a Trump clone would look and sound if the DNA sample had degraded during its 15-year wait in the freezer, causing a few mutations but not remotely disguising the similarity.

No relationship between concurrent leaders has been as symbiotic. Trump credits Brexit, and therefore, the Johnson without whom it woudn’t be happening, with his election victory. He repaid that bounteous gift by illuminating for Johnson the path to a populist power-grab of his own.

Yet here they are in the same city, attending the same meetings, without so much as a fraternal terrorist fist-bump, let alone a surrogate father-and-son bear hug, for the cameras. There will be no cosy chat over the Earl Grey in No 10, no deliriously happy meal.

Perhaps it’s me being daft, but I must say there appears to be the embryo of a paradox here. Johnson is staking our post-Brexit economic future on the bona fides of a man he recognises as such lethal electoral poison by association that he could do no more to avoid him were Trump wearing a latex Andrew Neil face-mask.

Obviously, it would be nice if the president succumbed to the trademark amnesia, forgot the pleas to keep schtum from No 10, and sprayed Johnson endorsements around like a feral animal marking its territory. He would be well within his rights. US territory is what Britain will shortly become if the Tories win a majority.

Whether that would make much material difference to the election, one appreciates Johnson’s paranoia. Not for nothing is one of the best political reads published this year, by the apostate Republican strategist Rick Wilson, entitled Everything Trump Touches Dies.

For all that, one has the deathly sense that nothing – beyond Corbyn announcing his resignation – has the power radically to change the trajectory now.

In a world on nodding terms with sanity, the willingness to trust Trump – now threatening to add a 100 per cent tariff on French wine to his trade war with China – to honour the promise of a quick, generous trade deal would be an instant disqualifier.

It would, of course, have to queue on the runway behind an entire fleet of rival disqualifiers. But anyone who peddled that act of faith would be regarded – as someone once said of a partner in the love that this week dare not speak its name – as frankly unfit to hold the office.