Still uncertain about Trump? Let Boris Johnson guide you on this 'very compassionate man'

It’s heartening that the terrifying, grim reality of the president’s actions are so invigorating to some of his Tory fans

- Catherine Bennett

Short of emigration, what is the best option for Britain’s dazzled Trump followers now their hero confirms he is not Europe's ally but Vladimir Putin’s? That's assuming what we can’t in the case of Nigel Farage MP: that they do not share the US president’s well-documented weakness for a genocidal invader. Even his more respectable British acolytes have until recently finessed, quite successfully, their love of Trump with his long history of Putin- pleasing. No one more so than Boris Johnson, former prime minister, self-styled saviour of Ukraine and still Trump’s most dependable British idiot.

To Johnson's way of thinking, detailed in numerous Daily Mail columns, it is Trump-doubters who are always the ridiculous, panicking, hysterical, whingeing headless chickens. When Trump looked likely to win the US election, Johnson likened the reaction of the “western liberal intelligentsia” to “the shriek of elderly beldames leaping on the piano stool after spying a mouse in their petticoats”. The virile Johnson was more than willing to forget that business at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

With all the usual caveats, it is striking, sometimes uncanny, how often tributes to Trump by his UK supporters have echoed rhetoric in praise of an earlier political disruptor with territorial ambitions.

Here is Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail proprietor, for instance, writing in 1930 that his support for Germany’s Nazi party “had shocked the old women of three countries - France, Germany, and our own”. Like the beldame-connoisseur Johnson, who urges us to disregard Trump's thuggery - “I have always found him, personally, a model of old-fashioned courtesy and good manners” - Rothermere would assure readers that the private Hitler was “a perfect gentleman”, who “brings to Europe the blessed prospect of peace”.