British Prime Minister Boris Johnson responded with studied indifference to word that President Biden’s team removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office that had been displayed by the man he replaced, former President Donald Trump.
“The Oval Office is the president’s private office, and it is up to the president to decorate it as he wishes,” his spokesman told British media outlets.
The bust removal and even that Johnson was forced to respond shines a light on the many challenges facing the so-called “special relationship” between the two countries in the post-Trump era. Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, campaigned on rebuilding global alliances that became strained under the “America first” Trump.
“The Biden presidency is very anti-Brexit, and they intensely dislike the Trump president’s support for Brexit; and secondly, there’s resentment among some of the Biden team about Boris Johnson’s criticism of Obama — including over the Churchill bust,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner, an expert on U.S.-U.K. relations who worked for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
And, of course, Biden is “a euro-federalist, he’s very pro-EU,” Gardiner continued. “The removal of the Churchill bust … the White House team must have been fully aware of how this will be received in the U.K.”
Johnson’s Thursday posture differs from his comments about former President Barack Obama’s displacement of the sculpture in 2009, a move that Johnson surmised then might reflect “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” It’s a comment that a London mayor on the rise could make without regret in 2016.
A presidency later, Johnson has to fortify his relationship with Biden. It is a task made no easier by the arch Brexiteer’s old controversies with Obama, which were anchored in their disagreement over the United Kingdom’s place in the European Union as much as any culture war.
Another close observer of Anglo-American relations cautioned against overstating the significance of the new decor, which prioritizes busts of Democratic heroes and activists: Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (whose image adorned the Oval Office during the Trump and Obama eras); and Cesar Chavez, the first-generation American who rose to prominence as the founder of a national farmworkers union.
“It says a lot more about Biden and his priorities and his domestic focus than it says anything about his views regarding the U.S.-U.K. special relationship,” said Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior counselor John Hannah.
Still, Hannah foresees a “rocky road ahead in the U.S.-U.K. relationship” due to the more fundamental split that Churchill’s bust sometimes seemed to symbolize: “Biden and his entire team believes that Brexit was a serious mistake and wasn’t good for Britain and was harmful to U.S. interests and U.S. power and influence in Europe.”
Johnson’s indirect jousts with Obama unfolded in the heat of a political campaign over the fate of the U.K.-EU relationship, which ended with a win for Johnson and a divorce from Brussels. Obama’s opposition to the split may have seemed like a threat to Brexit, but the first African American president made a point to undercut Johnson’s implication that he harbored anything but admiration for Churchill.
“I don’t know if people are aware of this, but in the residence, on the second floor, my office, my private office is called the Treaty Room. And right outside the door of the Treaty Room … is a bust of Winston Churchill,” Obama said during the same press conference in which he encouraged Britons to remain in the EU. “I love Winston Churchill. I love the guy.”
Nonetheless, the attitude once imputed to Obama by right-wing critics gained traction during the Trump years, which saw a tide of “dislike” for icons of British and American history on both sides of the Atlantic. London protesters, taking inspiration from the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, vandalized Churchill’s larger-than-life image in Parliament Square with graffiti declaring that he “was a racist.”
Johnson denounced that attack on his wartime predecessor, praising Churchill for leading the U.K. to defeat Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s “fascist and racist tyranny,” but the political phenomenon already has complicated Johnson’s effort to smooth any lingering tensions with his American counterpart. A quick question about Biden from a reporter — “Do you think … that President Biden is woke?” — sent the typically loquacious prime minister stumbling.
“I can’t comment on that. … What I know is that he’s a fervent believer in the Transatlantic Alliance, and that’s a great thing and a believer in a lot of the things we want to achieve together and in so far as there’s nothing wrong with being woke,” Johnson said Wednesday afternoon. “I would put myself in the category of people who believe it’s important to stand up for your history and your traditions and your values and things you believe it.”
