As Johnson finally condemns Trump, Britain should examine its own shift to the right | Nesrine Malik

Not only was the UK complicit in the president's rise, but it has its own mobs and culture wars to answer for

The writer Alistair Cooke once observed: As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later." That is a kind way of saying that the British are always a few years behind the Americans, emulating them and then pretending that we came up with whatever it is we are mimicking, or coming up with a uniquely British version of it.

For example, Britain's allegedly evidence-based involvement in the Iraq war was largely - as President George W Bush wrote in an internal memo months before military action - a matter of it following the US's lead. So much of the special relationship between the two countries hinges on this keeping up of appearances, where the British political classes - who like to maintain their nation is the superior of the two, the original superpower - can admire and obey while holding on to the fiction that the UK is a more restrained country, less prone to the excesses of the other.