Boris Johnson Has a New American Hero
The prime minister is trying to present himself as a British FDR. But the U.K.’s problems are more about poor decision making than spending.
A new new deal?
Photographer: Central Press/Hulton ArchiveBoris Johnson wants Britons to lift their eyes to the horizon, forget Covid for a while and dream again. No longer cast as a Churchill at war, the British prime minister seems more inclined now to conjure up the healing figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. president whose New Deal sought to pull America out of the Great Depression.
In an interview on Monday, Johnson spoke of a new “Rooseveltian approach to the U.K.” The FDR reference wasn’t an accident. Michael Gove, a senior cabinet minister, devoted much of a weekend speech to the example of FDR, who “managed to save capitalism, restore faith in democracy, indeed extend its dominion, renovate the reputation of government, [and] set his country on a course of increasing prosperity and equality of opportunity for decades.”