On the eve of his visit to meet Rishi Sunak and the King, his critics here are wrong to claim the US leader is ‘anti-British’
It’s fair to say elements of the UK’s political establishment and rightwing media don’t much like Joe Biden. The US president was accused of being “anti-British” when visiting Northern Ireland in April. Conservative commentators sneered uneasily at subsequent scenes of him playing to the crowd in Ballina, his family’s ancestral home in County Mayo, as he recalled how his forebears fled famine-stricken (British-ruled) Ireland for a better life in America.
What really annoyed rightwing critics was that Biden visited Dublin on that trip, winning standing ovations in the Dáil Éireann, but didn’t find time to come to Westminster. “I’m at home,” he declared in Ireland’s capital. “I just wish I could stay longer.” It’s unlikely Biden will feel the same way on Monday when he makes a brief stopover in London to meet Rishi Sunak and King Charles, en route to Nato’s Ukraine crisis summit in Lithuania.
