BORIS Johnson has been accused of trying to “woo” US president-elect Joe Biden with his bells-and-whistles, new green revolution 10-point plan.

In this past weekend’s Sunday Times, Michael Glackin describes the PM’s sudden obsession with all things green as “a less than subtle attempt by the Johnson administration to ingratiate itself with …. Joe Biden”.

It will take more than bunging a few quid at the looming climate crisis to get the president-elect on side. He’s already made it clear that he hasn’t much time for a PM who made racist comments about his friend and former boss, Barack Obama.

Now, Johnson must be very frustrated to learn that this week Biden has picked Antony Blinken to be his secretary of state. Just as Boris hoped he might be getting back into the good books, Biden bets on Blinken, a man who thinks the UK’s handling of Brexit is a dog’s dinner, that it threatens peace in Northern Ireland, ruins young people’s future and is the result of a very similar phenomenon to Marine Le Pen’s xenophobia in France. Ouch. The truth hurts.

No matter how much green wizardry Johnson promises between now and the COP26 get-together in Glasgow next November, the elephant in the room as far as America is concerned is Brexit. The UK will no longer be the Atlantic bridge to Europe. In a metaphor which sums up Britain’s increasing isolation, the bridge will be diverted past the UK and straight onto Brussels. Which is such as shame

for Bojo as we know how much he loves bridges.

The New York Times described Antony Blinken as “a defender of global alliances”. He is about as far from the current truth-denying and sleekit secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, as Biden is from Trump. And when it comes to the “Britain Trump”, as the Donald once referred to our PM, Biden and Blinken are not just on a different page but in a whole different book.

Blinken described Joe Biden’s new presidency in three words – “leadership, co-operation and democracy”. These are words supremely lacking from Johnson’s last 12 months in power. Instead we have witnessed a chronic absence of leadership with dithering and delay on the pandemic, a failure to co-operate by aligning policy action with scientific advice and of course the very antithesis of democracy via the centralisation and power grabs from both the regions of England and the other countries of the UK.

As for democracy, well, just ask us Scots what we think of Johnson’s attitude towards that given the emasculation of our devolved parliament through the Internal Market Bill and indeed our voice silenced throughout the whole Brexit process.

To say that Biden and Johnson won’t have too much in common is to make a Cheshire Gorge of the Grand Canyon. Even the UK Government’s promised green revolution is under-funded as compared to Biden’s vision for combating global warming and damage to the environment. As for the law, Biden is jumping back into international treaties with his bid to rejoin the Paris Accord, while Johnson’s reputation for respecting international law is irredeemably tarnished, thanks to the counter-productive attempt to renege on the EU withdrawal agreement.

The world is changing again, and the UK Government are on the wrong side of history. No amount of shape-shifting can help Johnson wriggle out of the reality of Brexit, deal or no deal. Next year might see the nation getting vaccinated but it will not see Boris vindicated.

It will be instead marked by food and medicine shortages as the ports and roads clog up with vans and lorries, not to mention ever more horrendous job losses and financial disaster all round. But as far as the Brexiteers are concerned (protected by their vast wealth and elite status), all this misery will be worth it. After all we will have regained control of our self-inflicted economic carnage.

Former Irish ambassador to the EU and the UK, Bobby McDonagh, summed it up perfectly when he wrote in the Irish Times this week that the “UK’s recent narrow understanding of sovereignty belongs to a receding Trumpian world”– less Global Britain, more Lonely Britain. McDonagh adds, “the necessary corollary of valuing one’s own country’s sovereignty is recognising that others equally value their sovereignty”. That sounds like a concept too far for the “Farage-ified” UK Government. Not so much Britain First, more last-chance saloon. Britannia rules the waves? Well, maybe more like the wave goodbye.

Ultimately, it’s most likely that Biden will find a way to work with Johnson over climate change purely because it is a global issue and it’s crucial that the big players act like grown-ups, rise above their differences and get their act together to reduce emissions pronto to do the important job of saving the planet. Johnson will of course try to spin this as a success for Old Blighty, but something tells me that Biden might have some stringent conditions attached to even the appearance of agreement on green issues with the UK.

In any case, by November next year, it might not even be Johnson in power. He could be hoist by his own Brexit petard, skulking in some country house, out of sight and out of mind while the Tories indulge in some major damage limitation.

Trump out and possibly Johnson out too. That would leave Scotland to get out for a winning treble.