Welcome to 2024’s saddest race – who gets to be Britain’s ‘Trump whisperer’? | Marina Hyde

Every luminary from Boris Johnson to the MP for Clacton has been lining up for a chance to enter the former president's backchannel

Boris Johnson's supporters will always tell you he is hugely popular in the US, so the spectacle of the former British prime minister addressing a ballroomful of empty chairs at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee is hideously poignant. Politically speaking, it is obviously even worse than when Cheryl got binned off the US X Factor. The idea of one or other of The Anecdotes falling with no one to hear it ... well, Johnson was not so much casting his pearls before swine as spaffing them all over an empty pigsty.

But the erstwhile PM was not alone. I mean, he was virtually alone in the ballroom - but he had a peer group out there in Milwaukee. Liz Truss, Nigel Farage, Russell Brand - it's almost as if the US election will be fought more edifyingly than the contest to be the most desperate Brit at the RNC. Nothing says our empire ended several decades ago" like the scramble to get in on the end of theirs.