Boris Johnson has to get used to the role of ‘convenor-in-chief’ – rather than the UK leading the world

Boris Johnson is one fortunate politician – and the exigencies of the Covid-19 pandemic and his own brush with death should not be allowed to obscure that.

He stayed his bid for the Conservative leadership immediately after the Brexit referendum and returned as victor after Theresa May proved unequal to the task. He gambled on a December election in 2019, and won a landslide majority. Rightly or wrongly, none of the persistent complaints against him has – so far – stuck.

He emerges into (what we must hope is) the post-pandemic world as prime minister of a UK that holds the presidency of the top countries’ club, the G7, and will host Cop26, the global gathering on climate, this autumn. In between will come the final stages of the postponed Euro 2020, to be held in London. The clustering of these UK-based gatherings is coincidental, but Johnson could hardly have wished for a better stage from which to project Brexit Britain as a global presence. If – and it is a very big if – he can play it right.

The G7 in Cornwall is an opportunity, but it is also a test – one which is already allowing the government machine to show off its undoubted strengths in event-management alongside Johnson’s own sense of theatre. What is more, the weekend comes with a triple bonus: not only is Johnson hosting the first multilateral summit to be held “in person” since the pandemic curbed even VIP foreign travel; not only will it be taking place without the disruptive presence of Donald Trump; and not only is it the first international trip of Joe Biden’s presidency – but it comes with a bilateral UK-US meeting attached.

Not for Johnson the demeaning rush to greet the new president at the White House (the sooner Theresa May’s abject dash to Washington is expunged from the memory, the better). The balance of advantage this time is different – visually, at least. And the post-Trump White House is playing along.

I cannot recall a US presidential arrival like that of Joe and Jill Biden at RAF Mildenhall as the sun was setting on Wednesday night, with the first couple addressing assembled US troops with a setpiece speech to the effect of “America is back, and so is the special relationship.”

Thursday comes with the signing of an “Atlantic Charter” to replace the one signed by Roosevelt and Churchill 80 years ago. It is largely platitudes and statements of intent. But the point in this case – pure Johnson – is not substance or small print, it is style and image: the image, complete with ship and sea, that says the UK may have left the EU but it is not friendless; the transatlantic entente is alive and well; the UK has options.

Now there are, of course, at least two caveats here. The first is that, in the longer term, substance does matter, and there are all sorts of obstacles to the trade deal that is, if not the only objective, then a big objective for the UK in relations with the US in the short term. Divergences on food standards and data protection are principled and entrenched, and the UK finds itself aligned more with Europe in these respects than with the US. (Nor are these differences new: they are the self-same differences that stalled EU-US negotiations on trade more than 20 years ago.) Any number of Atlantic Charters will not change this.

A second caveat comes in the form of the warning shot apparently fired by US diplomats in the direction of London even as the Bidens were leaving Washington. This consisted of some pointed advice to the effect that the UK had better reach an accommodation with Brussels over the Northern Ireland protocol, or else. How much of a shadow it casts over the weekend, however, is another matter. It was surely addressed not only to London but to the Irish constituency in the US – the message being that Biden will not be bamboozled by wily old Albion into selling out Ireland’s interests.

But there is a third and much bigger caveat. As I said, Johnson is a fortunate politician. For this weekend, he commands at least part of a global stage. He enjoys the limelight; he is good at gladhanding – remember London 2012? For better and worse, his personal intervention has untied several diplomatic knots (only, of course, as with Northern Ireland, for some of them to reappear later, not untied at all; but that is another story). Some of his sharpest critics, including French public opinion, have succumbed to his charm.

From all this, though, derives a significant risk: that Johnson overplays his hand, and with it that of UK diplomacy. This G7 summit brings together six rich-country leaders and an old-fashioned US president – who will behave, unlike his predecessor, as just one among equals (though he is not). There is also a real global crisis to address that is happening now, in the shape of the pandemic. The climate crisis will be discussed, but will have its day at Cop26 in November.

Over the next few days it is crucial that Johnson and the UK diplomatic machine never forget that they are the hosts and facilitators of the conversation, not the final arbiters. Their job is to put the visitors at ease, ensure that the proceedings run smoothly, and, if possible, end up with some basics for international action that everyone can sign up to. That sounds pretty modest, but it would represent progress over either Biarritz two years ago, or Quebec in 2018, when Trump flounced out early.

This time, one risk might be that the gathering – even though it includes Japan as a member and Australia, India, South Africa and South Korea as invited guests – seems skewed toward the North Atlantic, in part because of the UK-US summit that has preceded it (and the talk of a rekindled “special relationship”). If the UK is serious about reinventing itself as an international rather than a European or Atlantic player, then it has to start with the recognition that it is a medium-sized country of medium-sized means, and that dispatching half its fleet to show the flag in disputed waters far from home (as it has) might not be the best way to signal this.

It would surely be preferable for the UK to use its worldwide connections to assemble, and then marshal, the broadest possible participation in whatever endeavour it sets its mind to. And for Johnson to see himself not as bestriding the world, but as someone more like a convenor-in-chief. The drawback here might be that other countries have eyed – and to extent, occupied – such a role, Canada being a prime example.

A salutary reminder for Johnson and for the UK about where, post-Brexit, they fit in might come from a look at Biden’s schedule for his week in Europe. Yes, there has been a US-UK summit at the outset, and the UK-hosted G7 summit. But on Monday, Biden will be in Brussels for this year’s Nato summit; on Tuesday he will still be in Brussels to meet EU leaders; and on Wednesday he will be in Geneva, meeting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. The global headlines will follow him away from the UK.

There is a wider world out there, and it is a world in which Brexit Britain can take its place, but which it must be wary of claiming always to “lead”. The UK was already losing that role, if it ever had it, around the time of the first Atlantic Charter. Eighty years on, including nearly 50 years during which it was anchored in Europe, the UK finally needs to accept the constraints of its size and its wealth and work more collaboratively within its limitations. Whether Johnson is the prime minister to guide that shift in national mentality, we shall have to see.