Building Back Better? Boris’s woke words are more like Building Back Wetter

ONE job all Prime Ministers have is to get on with the US President. Most are pretty good at it.

Remember when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were best buddies? Everyone wondered how Blair would get on with Clinton’s successor? Turned out he got on well with George W Bush too. It was his job to do so.

But, in several ways, our current PM was starting off on a sticky wicket with this President.

In the past Joe Biden has claimed he sees Johnson and Biden’s own predecessor, Donald Trump, as being pretty much the same person. Not something he meant as a compliment.

What’s more, ahead of the G7, America’s most senior diplomat in Britain delivered an unusually strong rebuke to the UK.

It was a warning not to allow our current EU dispute to put peace in Ireland at risk. As though that question isn’t closer to our door than it is to Washington’s.

So with that and more, it was understandable that there was one leader who Boris made a special beeline for at the G7.

Even more than normal it was clear that Johnson — or should I say the Johnsons — knew they had one job in Cornwall. To spend as much time as possible wooing the Americans.

He was helped by some unique firepower, the Royal Family A-Team. The Queen, Prince Charles and Kate all joined the leaders of the world’s democracies in Cornwall.

BELLS AND WHISTLES

And on Sunday it continued, as the Queen held a private audience with the Bidens at her home Windsor Castle after the full bells and whistles of a Guard Of Honour by The Queen’s Company First Battalion Grenadier Guards.

This was showing love to an ally in the way Britain does best.

But at the summit itself, it was clear the PM was desperate to ensure that the love-in was also personal.

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Ever since Biden was announced as the victor of last November’s election, Johnson has been at pains to stress that he is nothing like the President who Biden compared him to.

In his first telephone conversation with the President after Biden’s inauguration in January, Johnson heavily stressed his green credentials.

It seemed he thought this would surprise the President, and show him Johnson isn’t the man Biden might have feared he was.

The brash, divisive schtick of President Trump was not his sort of thing, Joe, old chap.

At the G7, he went a step further. Stressing the importance of rebuilding our economies after the pandemic of the past year, Johnson said what all world leaders have been saying of late.

So often, indeed, as to sound sinister. As though every leader in the world has to sing from the same song sheet. So Johnson talked of the importance of “building back better”.

Then he added a couple of touches of his own. He talked of the importance of making sure that the recovery is one that people across our societies all benefit from.

He is right in that, of course. The aftermath of the last big economic crash in 2008 benefited too few people and left too many others stuck in the financial doldrums.

But what he said next was strangest. You might say he said it because German Chancellor Angela Merkel was at the table. Or because European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen was there.

But he suddenly said that it was necessary to “build back greener”, “build back fairer and more equal”.

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And then, said Johnson, we should also build back “in a more gender-neutral and perhaps more feminine way”.

What on earth does that even mean? What does it mean to say that an economic recovery should be “gender neutral”?

Is there any evidence that there are people out there planning to ensure only men benefit from the recovery?

And as for the feminine bit, nobody would say we should build back in a more masculine way. Because it wouldn’t make much sense to say so. So why claim that we should build back in a “more feminine way”?

For one reason alone. Johnson was on a wooing mission of his own and the target of his love was the 78-year-old man seated beside him.

Johnson made the guess that woke guff like this would be music to the ears of a US President who regularly talks in similar terms.

GENDER OBSESSIONS

Biden likes to think of himself as a sensitive, often teary guy. Like his deputy Kamala Harris, he regularly talks about women as though they are a greatly put-upon minority, with hardly any opportunities or visible positions in public life.

It is a strange reading of the world. One which risks demoralising the young women it is meant to inspire.

But it is a style that allows an elderly white man who has been in politics for five decades to look young and relevant and up to date with the current gender obsessions of our time.

So Johnson egged it in Cornwall. Overegged it, you might say. But it likely did the trick. Biden will leave convinced that Boris is not Donald Trump.

What happens next is the important bit. After all this back-slapping will the US put some actions to its words?

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