Donald Trump’s team don’t want to work with Boris Johnson because ‘they think he’s a joke’

Donald Trump’s administration don’t want to work with Boris Johnson because ‘they think he’s a joke’, it has been reported.

The Times said Britain’s foreign secretary is considered a laughing stock by the US president’s government in Washington.

In an article titled, ‘Our foreign secretary is an international joke’, Times columnist Rachel Sylvester wrote that diplomatic sources in the US said Trump officials ‘don’t want to go anywhere near Boris because they think he’s a joke’.

She wrote: ‘I’ve just spent a fortnight in America and was shocked by the number of tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers and political strategists I met who asked: “Why has your prime minister appointed a fool as foreign secretary?”

One minister told The Times: ‘It’s worse in Europe. There is not a single foreign minister there who takes him seriously. They think he’s a clown who can never resist a gag.’

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The article claimed Mr Johnson has ‘made enemies and alienated allies’ at a crucial stage in its dealings with other nations.

Ms Sylvester wrote: ‘Boris Johnson is becoming the Where’s Wally? of international diplomacy.

‘All over the world the geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting yet at this time of huge global significance the foreign secretary is all but invisible on the international stage.

‘On the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, the crisis over Saudi Arabia and Qatar or the clash between the US and China, he is irrelevant.

‘On Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Turkey and Yemen, he is incoherent.

‘Occasionally he surfaces briefly, like a hostage paraded before the television cameras to prove he is still alive, as he did after a visit to Libya last week, but even then he is ineffective because he has ceded all influence to others.’

Referring to Mr Johnson’s relationship with Mr Trump, The Times accuses Mr Johnson of making ‘a serious strategic error in aligning himself so quickly with a divisive populist across the Atlantic who no longer even has the support of his own Republican Party’.