In the debate over Trump and Johnson, as to which man constitutes the more severe national embarrassment, the entry of Ivanka on to the world stage arguably gives the US monster an edge.
For their achievements in lying, racism, conceit, incompetence, rudeness, jingoism, greed, crotch-length ties, laziness, fiscal opacity, diplomatic offences, hair choices, sexual incontinence and infantile fantasies featuring bridges, walls and tanks, the men are surely – taking into account that Johnson has yet to enjoy the enhanced misconduct opportunities that come with national leadership – well matched.
Any specific disparity – Trump has not been recorded plotting GBH on a journalist – can usually be offset by signs of potential in the other brute: a Trump tweet appeared to endorse body slamming journalists. If Trump can’t write, it turns out that Johnson, given his ignorance on Brexit, can’t read. In the field of nepotism, however, Trump now has a convincing claim to be the more shameless of the two.
The spectacle, at the G20, of Ivanka’s blow dry insinuating itself into various intra-leader discussions, inspired, as well as the Zelig-like meme, #UnwantedIvanka, further lamentations over the reduction of US foreign policy to a Trump marketing mission, featuring ever more numerous Trump loved ones (to borrow Johnson’s term for his own relations). Pertness, on their part, is actively encouraged. “She’s going to steal the show,” Dad promised of Ivanka, accurately enough. No one else there got compared to “a half-wit Saudi prince”.
The intergenerational Trump tour, invented after the entire British royal family volunteered as extras, appears not, then, to have been a hideous one-off, or not for as long as the diplomatic world – minus Christine Lagarde – politely endures a level of nepotistic mischief that leaves our own Johnson family looking positively coy. Admittedly, Johnson can boast – or so Matt Hancock hopes – a strong record in the related field of tribal loyalty.
A former Evening Standard editor who supported his mayoral bid was – get this, Matt – rewarded with a top arts job, notwithstanding glaring inexperience and allegations of cronyism. Subsequently, the mayor’s waste of £53m on the pointless garden bridge project, emerged as, effectively, an elaborate favour to that well-known planning visionary, Joanna Lumley, a family friend. She has explained this near-victory for her pet abomination: “I’ve known Boris since he was four, so he’s largely quite amenable.”
And it might further indicate a future challenge to the Trump family’s achievements in unearned eminence that, long before we were introduced to diplomat Ivanka, millions of us were, largely thanks to the BBC, aware that “related to Boris Johnson” is the name of a career.
The incessant media appearances, in particular, of Stanley Johnson, reality TV celebrity, frequent flier, and now, ubiquitous proxy for his debate-dodging son, has come to look unexceptional. It’s as if ambitious British politicians – or all twice-married, middle-aged shaggers already on to their fifth child, or so, with a daughter-aged girlfriend – were invariably supervised, like a tot at a talent contest, by a helicopter parent.
That said, even audiences accustomed to seeing BBC presenters introduce Stanley Johnson as a precious and insightful authority on his own Little Miss Sunshine, may have been surprised to find this pushiest of lesser Johnsons invited on Newsnight to review the Tory leadership debate: “At last I see a big shining light.” A Father’s Day theme appeared to justify an extended appearance, by the doting rough-beast progenitor, on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. Anyway, the producers may also have reasoned, they could hardly get the late Admiral Hunt to tell them what a good boy Jeremy has always been.
If traditional, English respect for hereditary advantage – together with a tolerance of nepotism that extends to the heart of the Labour party – explains much of the transformation of a retired MEP into the celebrity who is #wantedStanley, it helps that the older exhibitionist has often portrayed himself as a virtuous corrective to his son’s foolery. Stanley Johnson, we have previously learned, is (as in, was) pro-Remain, super keen (within reason) on the planet, a model father (ie, not a Boris-grade sleazebag). Proof, along with support from a more appealing, pro-Remain son, Jo, that national representation by Boris and a replacement consort with, from memory, an MA from the Body Shop in Dolphin Studies, will not be as frightful as it looks?
Painful as it is, we must acknowledge that, even if the older Johnson’s devotion to the planet requires him to generate annual CO2 emissions approaching greater Manchester’s, the similarities between these loved ones are, as in the Trump and Kim dynasties, more striking, sometimes uncannily so. In spewing Latin tags and sub-Wodehousian bluster, on “letterbox” burkas, on moralising, in cheese raiding, insulting Irish people, live birth rates, difficulties with MI6, and breast humour alone, it seems that the apple Johnson has fallen only microscopically far from the tree. Boris Johnson: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts.” Dad (enchanting a studio audience with tales of a “very well endowed” assistant): “What a pair of knockers!”
Supposing, at this advanced stage in the political catastrophe, there remains any doubt about Boris Johnson’s instincts when choosing between Johnsonism and the national interest, one also notes that the person who raised him, currently campaigning for a BackBoris Brexit, is simultaneously being quoted against it, by pro-Remain Best for Britain (“Britain benefits from environmental legislation and funding”).
That the BBC was invaluable, with its serial platforms and tribute programmes, in conjuring up Boris Johnson, has become as obvious as it is irreversible. You might think that one such horror, however inadvertently created, is enough. Stanley Johnson’s priorities and accomplishments appear, on examination, to be identical to, and therefore as basic as, his son’s. Unlike hapless G20 leaders waylaid by Ivanka, our broadcasters don’t – yet – have to act interested.
