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The oddest thing about the latest row over Donald Trump’s allegedly racist tweets is not whether the various responses of Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson are appropriate or not,

but the fact that it has crossed the Atlantic at all. Since when did British politicians feel the need — indeed, the obligation — to wade into the domestic politics of the United States?

Trump’s deeds may be our business. But his every word? The answer is that social media and its accompanying moral imperatives have now pervaded our lives to such an extent that within hours

of a spat erupting in Washington, their counterparts in London are expected to take sides to signal their own virtue. So yesterday’s dance of the scolds began with Downing Street stating

that it was “completely unacceptable” for Trump to tell four Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to their presumed countries of origin. Then Hunt dragged his three half-Chinese children

into it, saying that if anybody told them to “go back to China” he would be “utterly appalled”. Boris chimed in to harrumph that “you simply cannot use that kind of language”. He too thought

it “totally unacceptable”. None of them, however, condemned the President’s intemperate injunction, directed at four “women of colour”, as “racist”, so their denunciations were in turn

deemed scandalously inadequate by many on the Left. Curiously, Jeremy Corbyn — normally the first to denounce Trump in the harshest possible terms — was silent this time. Could his

uncharacteristic reticence have to do with the fact that the Labour leader is himself under investigation for presiding over institutional anti-Semitism? Almost certainly not: it would not

occur to Corbyn that Labour’s glass house might not be the best place from which to cast anti-racist stones. The truth is that the nuances, explicit and implicit, of American politics are

lost on British observers. It’s true that Trump doesn’t care whom he offends as long as he can force the Democrats to defend their most extreme outriders: the four congresswomen known as

“the squad”. To complicate matters, these “victims” — who have criticised their own party leader, Nancy Pelosi, for racism, never mind Trump — are also not above criticism. As Ayaan Hirsi

Ali argued this week in the Wall Street Journal, Ilhan Omar exhibits the same Islamist anti-Semitism in which she herself was indoctrinated in their native Somalia. The difference is that Ms

Hirsi Ali is now a friend of Jews, while Ms Omar calls them “the Benjamins”, insinuating that they control the Trump administration. Race has always played a much bigger role in the US than

in Britain, for obvious reasons. In recent years, identity politics has poisoned the wellsprings of democracy in America. Trump has demonstrated that both sides can play this game. If there

is one transatlantic import that is even less appetising than chlorinated chicken, it is identity politics. Yet there are plenty of people who seem determined to force everyone in public

life to play this game of ideological Russian roulette. The _Guardian_, for instance, regularly accuses Boris Johnson of Islamophobia, despite his record as Mayor of London, the City with

the largest Muslim community in Europe, except Istanbul. The latest charge is that in his book _The Dream of Rome_, published in 2006, he claimed that Islamic conservatism inhibited

capitalism and democracy for a thousand years and that this backwardness has led to “Muslim grievance” which fuels conflict across the world. Johnson’s thesis, like most of his opinions, is

not original; indeed, such arguments have been debated for decades, if not centuries. Entire libraries have been written by great scholars, such as Bernard Lewis, in the attempt to explain

why the Muslim world fell behind the West. More ideological academics such as Edward Said have blamed “orientalism” for what they see as this distorted Western perspective. It is this

critique that is now being weaponised to delegitimise criticism of Islam, past and present, under the rubric of Islamophobia. It would be a sad day if British politics were to descend to a

level where the only things that mattered were ethnicity, race and religion. We should leave the politics of identity to our transatlantic cousins. It would never have occurred to Winston

Churchill as Prime Minister to criticise Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to ban lynching, or for Margaret Thatcher to offer a running commentary on Ronald Reagan’s opposition to desegregation.

No useful purpose is served by British leaders offering unsolicited advice to Donald Trump.