How a general election on one side of the Atlantic helps us predict one on the other

The UK is gearing up for another general election and as I sort out the papers for my proxy vote from abroad, my American political columnists have been opening discussions with me about the comparisons between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Are their similarities genuine? Are they overplayed? Is everyone getting a bit too carried away because they have identical hairstyles? Is the Conservative Party really as right-wing as the Republican Party? Do people actually call Trump “Mr Brexit”? The answer to pretty much all of these questions – except the last one – is “yes”.

Both US politicians and diplomats are watching the UK’s general election with a close eye. As my colleague Louis Staples pointed out this week, Bernie Sanders’ team have good reason to watch how Jeremy Corbyn handles criticism from Boris Johnson – and where the right wing of the Conservative Party consider Corbyn’s weaknesses to be. They will be learning from Corbyn’s missteps as much as his triumphs. One Democrat friend mentioned to me how Corbyn’s teacher-like composure and his pinched, quiet annoyance in the face of Tory torments seems strange to people on this side of the Atlantic.

Sanders, seeing that it appears a little holier-than-thou and doesn’t work in the face of a larger-than-life entertainer like Johnson, has leaned in to his reputation as a “shouter”: his team have even released merchandise emblazoned with the slogan “Bernie shouts for me”. When accused of being too loud on debate stages, he replies that he’s loud because the issues are urgent and his powerful, indomitable voice is proof that he has “the guts” to hold corrupt billionaires to account.

The left has perhaps focused on “going high when they go low” for too long; it’s clear when you speak to voters that many read that as quiet superiority on the part of the “liberal elite” rather than a principled refusal to scrap. Hillary Clinton was accused, like Corbyn, of seeming “like a schoolteacher” telling off Trump for his radical views. The electorate saw themselves reflected in Trump, a person who “didn’t belong” in DC with seasoned politicians attempting to put him back in his place.

Boris Johnson waving British flags while hanging from a zip-wire might have had a similar charm – but it’s a long time since then, and he won’t be able to play solely off that in the election. Like Trump, he is no longer able to use that dependable conservative fallback – a strong economy – to balance out his gentle buffoonery. On both sides of the pond, indeed, economies which should be strong are struggling after the ideological decisions of right-wing politicians.

That could be why Johnson has gone into full attack mode against Corbyn this week. CNN, which rarely pays attention to British political rows, reported on “how nasty British politics has become” when Johnson wrote that Corbyn has a “vindictiveness not seen since Stalin” on Wednesday. This is familiar territory for Republicans, who often use the word “socialist” interchangeably with “communist” and suggest that Democrats want to turn America into Venezuela or North Korea – but they usually dance around the issue a little more, rather than drawing direct comparisons with known genocidal dictators. Like Sanders deflecting such criticisms about Medicare-for-All, Corbyn’s reply focused on how “super-rich” people “will do anything to avoid paying a little more tax”. But he might have to borrow from the Sanders playbook and get a little more combative in the future if he wants that message to get through strongly.

Equally, Democrats watched with interest when Donald Trump said he thought his “friend” Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage would make a “great team”, which seemed to directly result in Johnson publicly promising not to work with the Brexit Party. Like when Trump talked up a trade deal between the US and the UK at the UN General Assembly a couple of months ago and Johnson cut in to say to the cameras that “the NHS is not for sale”, it’s clear someone like Boris Johnson – a politician who has played both far-right agitator and moderate, cuddly conservative uncle depending on the climate at the time – has worked out that populist Trumpian politics isn’t here to stay, and doesn’t want to align himself too strongly with it. Many Democrats see such moves from across the Atlantic and think global politics is swinging back towards the left, giving them cause for optimism in 2020. This week’s Democratic triumphs in Virginia and Kentucky can only add to that impression.

It’s worth bearing in mind that there’s a whole other contingent of people watching the election with interest as well: diplomats. Tom Rogan, one of my writers in Washington DC who spends most of his time with diplomatic staff who work for the UK and the US, reported this week for Voices that most American diplomats want to see a Boris Johnson victory. They worry that Corbyn, whose entire career has focused on calling out American hegemony, will attempt to make global changes which disadvantage the United States and its international interests. Bernie Sanders has similar, but less radical, views on foreign policy – he recently wrote an op-ed promising to pull the US military out of the Middle East and to end America’s “endless wars”. Interestingly, that’s very similar to Trump’s foreign policy, right down to the familiar “endless wars” phrase, which The Donald likes to roll out on the regular. This campaign promise is why he controversially pulled US troops out of Syria just a few weeks ago. But the fact that diplomats worry about a British PM like Corbyn changing the fundamentals of shared foreign policy suggests that Trump is usually able to be reined in, and that his Syria move may have simply been a vote-winning one-off.

Yours,

Holly Baxter

US opinion editor