Prime Minister Boris Johnson will be happy to see President Donald Trump leave the White House, the former head of Britain’s Civil Service said on Monday.
Lord Mark Sedwill was, until his departure in September, the Cabinet Secretary, making him the highest-ranking civil servant in the country. He said that it would be “mistaken” to believe that Mr Johnson would have preferred a Trump victory in the presidential election.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Lord Sedwill said: “Based on my time working for Boris Johnson in Downing Street, I believe those who have said he would have preferred a second Trump term are mistaken.
“That would not have been to the benefit of British or European security, to transatlantic trade, let alone the environmental agenda to which the Prime Minister is so committed.”
Lord Sedwill went on to say that amidst reports that President-Elect Joe Biden is ready to put differences over Brexit — which unlike President Trump, the 77-year-old globalist politician was long opposed — and that it is time for Johnson’s ‘Global Britain‘ strategy to come to the fore.
“The key is for the western democracies to put the frictions of the past few years behind us,” Sedwill pronounced.
On Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab doubled down on Britain’s support for the incoming Biden administration, claiming that the nominally Conservative government in London is “not lukewarm” towards Mr Biden.
“We also made clear we had the full confidence in the system of checks and balances in the U.S. to provide a definitive result and a smooth transition and we look forward to working with the new administration,” the foreign secretary said.
Mr Raab denied that the government has attempted to “cosy up to Trump”, going on to say of the unrest at the Capitol building on January 6th: “We made clear that the scenes by a small but ugly minority in Washington were disgraceful.”
While Prime Minister Boris Johnson has often been compared to President Trump, with some even dubbing him ‘Britain’s Trump’, the reality is that besides their support for the pro-sovereignty Brexit movement, the two leaders do not share much in terms of political policy.
Despite being the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Mr Johnson is far more aligned politically with the Democrats in the United States, on such issues as climate change, immigration, free trade, and coronavirus lockdown restrictions.
Mr Johnson has also previously expressed disdain for then-candidate Trump during the 2016 presidential election, claiming that he showed “stupefying ignorance” in saying that there are “no-go areas” of London.
Johnson, who was serving as the mayor of London at the time, said that the remarks from Trump showed that he was “unfit to hold the office of President of the United States”.
“I would invite him to come and see the whole of London and take him round the city except that I wouldn’t want to expose Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump,” he added.
Mr Johnson would later temper his stance on the American leader, saying that he displayed “many good qualities“.
The attempts from the political establishment in Britain to court the incoming Biden administration comes amidst reports that the neo-liberal president-elect will make his first foreign visit outside of North America to the United Kingdom.
A “close friend” of Mr Biden said that he would seek to put the differences with Johnson to bed in order to plot the “destiny of the world” at the upcoming G7 summit in Cornwall.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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