Often spoken of in the same breath, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are not in fact all that similar. Both men inspire devotion among their followers. Both men are egotists, born privileged in New York. Both have weaknesses when it comes to the opposite sex.

But Johnson is more of an introvert than Trump and less interested in money. Boris is a voracious reader who writes his own books. Donald might, like the satirical horror novelist Garth Marenghi, be one of the few people who has written more books than he’s read.

Still, it is curious how, since the rabble-rousing year of 2016, the lives of Johnson and Trump have overlapped. This week, we see Donald Trump about to be indicted in New York over a complicated allegation that he falsified his business records to cover up secretive payments to an adult entertainer. We also see Boris Johnson hauled up before the privileges committee, his political career on the line, over whether he ‘recklessly’ misled parliament in his failure to adhere to social-distance guidelines.

The story is driven by a primal desire to kill off a big beast who once dared to upend the political world

Boris’s tale is like a twee PG-13 English adaptation of Trump’s X-rated gangster flick. Trump’s involves porn stars, arrests, hush money, obviously crooked lawyers and a shockingly blatant attempt to use the justice system for political ends. Boris’s involves Whatsapp messages, cake, and relatively mild disagreements about the committee’s remit in this particular case.

Yet the political dynamics are alike. Perhaps the strongest similarity is not between Boris and Donald but the people who hate them: Boris/Trump Derangement Syndrome drives sufferers equally mad. See, for instance, Alastair Campbell, who really did help mislead Britain into a war that cost more than a million lives, tweeting yesterday that he doesn’t believe Boris Johnson nearly died of Covid.

Campbell and a few other loonies aside, the Westminster ‘Get Boris’ camp usually dress up their animus in very English fair play play. We hear polite legalisms about parliamentary procedure, as well as plenty of cant about why MPs must never lie to parliament – heaven forbid! But the drive is the same primal desire to kill off a big beast who once dared to upend the political world.

There’s also a growing similarity between the Tory Party and its relationship to Boris and the Republican party vis-a-vis Trump. The new leadership of both parties would much rather move on. Top Tories and Republicans are frightened to say so out loud – because the dastardly beast could always make a comeback – but if Johnson and Trump were to be taken out the political picture, it would suit them perfectly.

Rishi Sunak hopes that, after a long bleak winter, he’s just coming into the springtime of his Premiership – strikes petering out, the Windsor Framework widely praised, and, fingers crossed too tight, recession narrowly avoided. Similarly, the Republican party’s strategists know that, while they can’t thrive without Trumpist votes, they keep losing elections because the Donald is so toxic at the ballot. The party’s big money men are duly backing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, as is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, ahead of the presidential election next year.

And here’s the funniest part: the opposite is true for the Labour party and the Democrats. Keir Starmer and Joe Biden will put on their most disgusted faces and talk about the importance of honesty in politics etc. But their dirty secret is that they want Trump and Johnson in the news. They want to keep bringing the exhausting Trump/Johnson conversations back up, because doing so fires up their support and splits their opponents.

In the end, even if Biden is in power and Labour are not, that means Boris and Trump still both make the political weather, even though their own parties would much rather someone else did instead.