David Cameron discovered the hard way this week that his much-vaunted presentational skills are not enough to get what he wants.
Just days after the Westminster political bubble had cooed over another of his one-shot video clips, this time explaining why Nato needs to back Ukraine, he came into contact with the hard reality of some US Republicans’ scepticism on that very subject.
The Foreign Secretary’s no-notes spiel, delivered as he walked from the Nato meeting to his ministerial car, was an undeniably impressive feat of memory.
Yet while it garnered him 12,000 “likes” and two million views on X (formerly Twitter), and while it exposed just how awful Rishi Sunak is at similar performances, Cameron’s clip underlined his political flaws as much as his PR strengths.
The man who famously said in Opposition that “too many tweets might make a twat” seemed to forget his own advice, not least as he ended his video with a hectoring mantra that Nato had to “get on the phone to Speaker Johnson” (Republican Mike Johnson, a big Donald Trump backer) to get the US Congress to pass a bill to release billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine.
“I’m going to see him next week and say ‘we need that money’,” Cameron thundered at the end of his West Wing-style walk-and-talk.
Except he didn’t get to see Johnson at all. In an embarrassing snub for a British Foreign Secretary who had flown to Washington to lobby support, the Speaker pulled out. Diary issues were cited, but it seems Johnson was unimpressed with Cameron’s attempt to publicly bounce him.
In fact, it felt like Cameron had repeated the mistakes he had committed so spectacularly on Brexit. His cockiness (remember he told EU leaders he would win the referendum) and his “I know what’s best for you” lecturing tone went down as badly in the US in 2024 as they had in Britain in 2016.
Crucially, it seems he forgot his own poor reputation with his key audience. Just as Cameron was a terrible salesman for the Remain campaign among Labour Leave-voting areas that resented his austerity policies, he was a terrible salesman among Trumpian Republicans who haven’t forgotten his cosiness with Barack Obama and his pro-China policies.
No one remembers that period more than Brexit-backing Donald Trump, whom Cameron met for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home this week. Cameron said the discussion was private, but Trump’s team said they discussed “ending the killing in Ukraine”, a hint that the ex-President still preferred a peace deal to continuing military aid.
As it happens, there is still a glimmer of hope of the US unblocking its aid package in Congress, perhaps if a compromise can be reached on Trump’s plan to give Ukraine an interest free, waivable loan rather than a gift of cash.
Yet any prodding by Cameron may have much less impact than another Johnson: Boris Johnson. It was the former PM who last summer laid the groundwork in visiting Trump, and who has skilfully exploited his friendship with the ex-President, to persuade him of Kyiv’s plight.
The latest Russian air strike, completely destroying Kyiv’s largest power plant, was a reminder that President Volodymyr Zelensky is desperate for new help to fend off Vladimir Putin this year. It’s telling too that some Nato members talk of “Trump-proofing” weapons for Ukraine ahead of his possible victory over Joe Biden later this year.
And at a centre-right gathering in Canada this week, our former PM summoned up more passion, and more wit and guile, on Ukraine than Cameron could. Instead of deploying the smooth globalism of the Foreign Secretary, he pleaded with “conservative friends” in the USA to send a signal to China and other autocratic regimes.
As well as saying arming Ukraine was “a fantastically efficient way of supporting freedom” (just five per cent of the US defence budget to seriously degrade Russia’s military), Johnson hammered a Trump-style point that the spending would boost American manufacturing jobs in defence.
It’s also worth saying too that, as improbable as this may sound, there is a sensible side to Trump that is open to persuasion. When Iran shot down a US drone in 2019, he refused to launch retaliatory strikes on Iranian targets after being told there would be too many civilian casualties.
“There’s method in his madness” Johnson once privately told colleagues, and he’s one of the few who can appeal to it. As Foreign Secretary, he had told US officials “The President is making America great again”, and the President famously called him “Britain Trump”. For all Trump’s closeness to Nigel Farage, he knows Johnson has a better (albeit outside) chance of becoming British PM again.
In a spat with the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott at the Canada event, Johnson also made the jobs-first case for tackling climate change. “You don’t mind if we are all going to fry,” he said, as he mocked Abbott’s “scientific competence”.
It was ballsy stuff, and contrasted with Sunak’s desperate attempt to use net zero scepticism to shore up a core vote back home. It adds firepower to those Republicans urging Trump to retain Biden’s clean tech subsidies, not least as they provide lots of blue collar jobs in “red” states.
Of course, Johnson’s own domestic record was one of chaos, incompetence and a chronic slipperiness with the truth. But on two of the key global issues of our times, he’s at least telling it how it is, to an audience that needs to hear it, in the language they understand.
If Johnson can persuade Trump of the self-interest in fighting climate change as much as the self-interest of fighting Putin (and yes, that is still a big ‘if’), he may create a global legacy greater than anything he managed to achieve in the UK.
Johnson may never regain the trust of the British public. But in gaining the former President’s trust, he could “Trump-proof” the next four years to help Ukraine, the UK and even the planet itself.
Paul Waugh resigned as i’s chief political commentator in January to stand as the Labour candidate for Rochdale, a contest won by Azhar Ali