Britain's Conservative party leadership candidate Boris Johnson. Photo / AP
Britain's Conservative party leadership candidate Boris Johnson. Photo / AP
EDITORIAL:
The world could soon have two powerful leaders known for their hair, bombastic presence, explosions of scandal and own ways of doing things.
Boris Johnson is facing off against Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt in a mail ballot of Conservative Party members to become the British Prime Minister.
Johnson isthe favourite, but his campaign is skidding at the start after police were called to his home over a domestic row. Yesterday he refused to explain and told Tory members that people did not "want to hear about that kind of thing".
In the United States, President Donald Trump faced sexual assault allegations in the latest New York Magazine, from two decades ago. His first response was to say of the accuser, "I've never met this person in my life," even though a photo in the article showed them together.
Allegations of sexual assault and the Access Hollywood tape failed to derail Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. There have been revelations of hush-money payments to two women since then.
While it may appear that Trump pays no political penalty for such incidents, at last year's Midterm elections women preferred Democrats to Republicans by 59 to 40 per cent. Exit-poll data showed the 19 per cent gap was the biggest in decades and nearly double what it was in 2016.
Trump's approach to such news reports is to deny and/or not apologise and show any shame. His party sticks with him because he is the Republican gateway to power until possibly 2024.
Stonewalling and sticking it out will likely work for Johnson with his party membership. He is seen as the Tories' best hope of staunching the flow of supporters to the Brexit Party. He would be an unpredictable sea change from rigid Theresa May.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. Photo / AP
Trump's great weapon in diluting troublesome news is his ability to create more news and drown it out. Trump stories are a daily multi-headed Hydra, meaning no one item of news carries its full weight and there are too many strands to follow.
As he was batting away the sex-assault story, he was dealing with the fallout from coming close to conflict with Iran over a drone.
With his flair for the cinematic dramatic, Trump wrung every drop of macho out of a retreat, tweeting that the US military had been "cocked and loaded" and saying he called off a strike with minutes to spare when a general told him 150 people would probably die. The New York Times reported that Trump "liked the 'command' of approving the strike, but also the decisiveness of calling it off".
While a dangerous further escalation was avoided, US foreign policy on Iran, as with North Korea and Venezuela, fits into a pattern where Trump hypes up a crisis and then pulls back while declaring his success at a time of his own choosing. Yesterday he was dangling the possibility of eventually becoming Iran's "best friend" rather like his "falling in love" with Kim Jong Un.
Britain will hope to avoid chaos that leaks credibility with its new leadership.
