Reagan loved Thatcher. Clinton was buddies with Blair. President Donald Trump has his own favorite British politician—but it’s not Prime Minister Theresa May, who he'll meet at the White House Friday.
Instead, Trump’s personal special relationship is with former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who played a key role in the surprise success of the Brexit campaign last year and has been a vocal supporter of Trump, first as a candidate and now as president.
Along with sharing Trump’s nationalist outlook, Farage is the kind of cheerleader and loyalist the president favors. While he’s had no formal role in May’s visit—“Farage is not acting as an intermediary for the Prime Minister," a senior U.K. government source said—he’s got a direct line to Trump adviser Stephen Bannon.
The two spoke this week to prep the administration for the May visit, according to a person close to Trump. “Nigel is trying to be helpful to the administration, and Bannon respects his worldview,” the person said.
Farage has met twice with Trump since the election, including once at Trump Tower in November. Trump tweeted at the time that he thought Farage should be named Britain’s ambassador to the U.S.
When Trump was hard-pressed to find endorsements internationally, Farage went out on the campaign trail for Trump. The two were introduced through Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, who said at an inauguration party hosted by Farage at the Hay Adams Hotel last week that Farage will be a “close but unofficial adviser” to Trump, according to the London Telegraph.
“I don’t want to speak for the president, but I know that the president has a great deal of trust in Nigel Farage, and I think he is going to turn to him as an adviser and there would be none better,” Bryant said, according to the British newspaper.
Like Trump, he’s a charismatic speaker with an everyman appeal who targets “elites” as the enemy, despite the fact that he’s a former commodities trader who went to one of the poshest schools in Britain.
The person close to Trump said the president sees Farage as someone who can create domestic pressure on May when it comes to negotiating trade deals and other bilateral agreements, if necessary.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who like Farage backed Brexit, said before the election that he was “genuinely worried” that Trump would become president. Johnson met with Bannon at the Trump Tower in December.
May's visit comes at a particularly tense time for the U.K. The country’s highest court ruled this week that she must seek parliamentary approval before moving ahead with Brexit, which passed by referendum last summer. Once exit negotiations begin, May could invoke Britain’s alliance with the U.S. to gain leverage in talks with her European counterparts. “Geopolitically she wants to have an advantage when dealing with the EU, to show that she has another option,” said a senior EU official who is involved in the Brexit negotiations.
The official said that May will want to show that she has a “tangible” relationship with the U.S.: “In terms of communication, she wants to show that she has an ally.”
William Dartmouth, a member of European Parliament for the UKIP party, said May should be embracing Farage as a way to forge a relationship with the new U.S. president.
“The fact that there’s a person who has a good relationship with the president of the United States, that’s a ‘get out of jail’ card,” he said.
Dartmouth suggested that May’s administration could have defused any tension with Trump, who is not quick to let go of past slights, by following Trump’s suggestion to name Farage ambassador.
Appointing Farage to the embassy in Washington would have some precedent. Former U.K. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan appointed John F. Kennedy’s friend William David Ormsby Gore, known as Lord Harlech, as his envoy to Washington because of his relationship with the president.
Farage’s spokesperson Hermann Kelly, Farage wants a free trade agreement as well as cooperation on NATO and intelligence-sharing. “He’s basically saying that the EU politically is coming toward an expiry date," Kelly said.
Tom McTague contributed to the report.