Woody Johnson: What a second Trump term would mean for the UK

If Donald Trump does return to the White House, then another restoration could soon follow. Woody Johnson, a confidant of the president since the 1980s, served as his man in London from 2017 to 2021 and is now tipped for a second spell as ambassador. ‘What I know about President Trump is if he asks you to do something, you probably do it,’ Johnson says. ‘So, it depends on what he would want me to do, if anything. If he would want me to do something, of course I would consider it.’

When we meet at the Republican National Convention in the splendour of Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel, it is just five days after a would-be assassin’s bullet narrowly avoided killing Johnson’s old friend. ‘He’s got divine inspiration or divine help. That’s the only way that happened. You know, he turned his head at that millisecond,’ Johnson, 77, says. His admiration for Trump is based on a long-term view: ‘You have to sit back and take a look at Donald Trump and who he is and what he’s done over the decades and not be distracted.’ Johnson lists the press, academic institutions and legal system as ‘100 per cent anti-Trump’. ‘He’s had huge, huge obstacles and yet somehow, he’s come through. You have to admire that.’

For much of Johnson’s time as ambassador, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose frontbench regularly lambasted Trump’s presidency. What advice can he give Starmer’s team on trying to build in-roads during a second term? ‘I met Keir Starmer and yeah, they did not like Trump. Keir Starmer is better at holding it…’ He pauses. ‘But I would try to keep the emotion out, to be practical and try to get to know in a new and different way what one of your former colonies, what’s going on.’