Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives and second in the US presidential line of succession, was addressing both Houses of Parliament, the first man in his job to do so. It was intended as a great honour, but the thing about addresses to both houses of Parliament is that they’re not all the same. At the top of the scale, there’s a speech in the 900-year-old Westminster Hall. That’s offered to the big guns, your Charles de Gaulle or Barack Obama. Lesser orators — Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping, say — get the Royal Gallery. On Tuesday, Mike Johnson got Committee Room 14.
This is not to knock Committee Room 14. It’s an important Committee Room, the site of packed meetings of the 1922 Committee and the Parliamentary Labour Party. If Johnson had been asked to speak in the cramped Committee Room 6, that would have been a straight-up insult. But Committee Room 14 is no Westminster Hall. No monarch has ever lain in state in Committee Room 14, even if sketchwriters have occasionally nodded off there. And it tells you something about the state of transatlantic relations that even Committee Room 14 wasn’t full on Tuesday morning for its important guest.
Johnson isn’t a household name in this country. His function in the Donald Trump administration is to pretend that whatever is happening that day is completely reasonable. If something is so awful that he can’t pull this off, he will pretend that he hasn’t seen it, or that it didn’t happen. This makes him sound spineless, and it’s true that some days it is only the starch in his shirt that keeps him from being a puddle on the ground. But the world is full of spineless men, and Johnson is a reminder to all of them that if they just keep agreeing with the boss, there’s nowhere that they can’t be third in command.
He was introduced by the Speaker of the Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, a man who is by nature a pacifier, keen for everyone to get along. This was not straightforward. We had all woken up to the news that the president, in between trying to catch the elves in the Oval Office skirting board that only he can see, had decided that Keir Starmer is now stupid and weak. Obviously Trump doesn’t mind people being stupid and weak, as a glance at those around him will tell you, but the prime minister’s bare-minimum objection to America annexing Greenland had stirred his ire.
Hoyle’s response was to simply pretend none of this was happening, like the ailing head of a horribly split family, trying to persuade everyone to pretend they get along for Christmas lunch. He gave a warm speech about the shared history of Britain and America, from the time they decided they wanted to get rid of our mad king, to the present day, when they’ve decided they need a mad king of their own.
Johnson opened by claiming that Hoyle was a hard act to follow. “When he gets wound up and going it’s just like Churchill,” he said, possibly referring to the dog in the adverts. “He goes on and on and on.” I believe one part of that, anyway.
Was he asking for our help against Trump?
Johnson’s approach to the current tensions between his boss and, well, everybody else was to allude to them only in code. Our countries, he said, need “to face and overcome together the challenges of our present day”. Although the challenge of this specific present day was all coming from one place. He uttered this sentence with great weight, almost as though he was trying to communicate a coded message. Was he asking for our help against Trump?
He’d spoken to the president, he told us, and explained that “I felt that my mission here today was to encourage our friends and help to calm the waters.” Trump’s response was to start tweeting abuse at European leaders, suggesting that he had different ideas about how the waters should look.
As he went on, another possibility sprang to mind. Perhaps Johnson has recruited some of the sarcastic writers who used to work for his British namesake Boris, filling his speeches with lines that were best understood as jokes against their employer. How else to explain the complaints that Russia was “more emboldened”, the warning against “the indulgence of self-interest” or the injunction to “call evil and madness what it is”? Hoyle looked round the room like a hawk when Johnson came out with that last line, daring anyone to laugh.
It was the kind of speech that would have been largely anodyne at many other points over the last century. As it was, it was like a toast to your parents’ long and happy marriage delivered while your father was loudly banging his secretary in the next room.
“We see the UK and Europe stepping up as faithful partners today,” Johnson said, speaking on behalf of the unfaithful partner currently posting screenshots of private messages from fellow leaders. He wanted to send this message of unity to “tyrants everywhere”. Except, obviously, the one tyrant he has on speed-dial.
There was the usual attack on unnamed bodies for fostering “a truly menacing scepticism towards history and our national institutions”, though there wasn’t time to say whether this scepticism was as truly menacing as the armed mob who stormed his own workplace five years ago. Frankly, if Johnson really wants to restore people’s faith in America’s national institutions, there are some obvious steps that he is uniquely placed to take.
“The great British philosopher GK Chesterton warned every high civilisation decays by forgetting obvious things, things like the dignity of the individual,” Johnson went on. “Every single person has inestimable dignity and value.” Unless they live in Minnesota. Or have dark skin. Or, worst of all, both.
“I’ll leave you with the thought of Ronald Reagan,” Johnson said as he closed. “He said freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” And Johnson, as it turns out, may be that generation. “With the right choices and the right leadership we can chart our renewal,” he said. It was intended to inspire, but it could have been heard as the lament of Committee Room 14.
