British and American politics are strangely alike – it’s all about Covid and immigration

This reads a little like a despatch from the future: “The euphoria so many of us felt as the vaccines took hold dissipated swiftly.” In fact, it is more a line from our past, because it is from Andrew Sullivan’s weekly post from the US, which I find one of the best ways of keeping up with how American politics feels from inside the beast.

The US is behind the curve on the Delta variant, and is experiencing the alarm about the rise in infections that we went through about a month ago.

Sullivan, a conservative who supported Barack Obama and who went to school with Keir Starmer, is a brilliant observer, whether you agree with him or not. And what was striking about his latest snapshot was how similar US and British politics are. Our pandemic cycles are slightly out of sync; and they have a government of the main party of the left; and yet so much is the same. They have the same debates about mask-wearing and vaccine passports as we do, and similar fluctuations in public approval of their government’s handling of the virus.

Joe Biden and Boris Johnson are both new leaders whose popularity is waning. In Biden’s case, this has been a steady slope; whereas Johnson has been on a rollercoaster – an early boost when the pandemic hit, a decline as he seemed to be handling it badly, a boost from the vaccines and now a decline again.

And on both sides of the Atlantic one of the biggest non-Covid issues is immigration. The same two issues dominate politics in most of Europe. In Britain, people crossing the Channel in small boats seem likely to feature in the headlines for the rest of the summer; in the US it is people crossing the border with Mexico, where Donald Trump never did build a wall. “Biden’s assurances that the huge uptick in migrants at the southern border was just seasonal have also lost any credibility,” reports Sullivan, just as Priti Patel’s attempt to sound tough have failed to make any difference to the numbers.

Naturally, the consequences of “a sense of things being out of control, even if it’s partly hysteria”, as Sullivan puts it, are different in the US and the UK, because Biden is vulnerable to a resurgence of Trumpian authoritarianism from the Republicans, whereas Johnson can rely on the Labour opposition not to go down that road.

Yet it is notable that the governing parties in both countries are already looking rather nervously to the succession. Sullivan notes that Kamala Harris, vice president and successor-designate “has unfavourables nudging 50 per cent” in the opinion polls. The British Conservative Party is in the better position of having a spare prime minister ready and waiting, with poll ratings rather better than Harris’s or indeed Johnson’s. Rishi Sunak is almost our equivalent of vice president, and he seems ready to take over when the vaccine “euphoria” finally fades.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator