It was a strange collection of British political figures who turned up in Washington this week to witness the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term as president. The Prime Minister was not invited (unsurprisingly – for all that the Labour government has been doing behind the scenes to try to undo the damage of past comments about Trump, Keir Starmer was never going to be top of an invite list that traditionally doesn’t include world leaders anyway). Nor was Kemi Badenoch.
Instead, the British contingent consisted of two former Tory prime ministers (Boris Johnson and Liz Truss), one current Conservative MP who has been sidelined by her colleagues (Suella Braverman), and one leader of an insurgent right-wing party (Nigel Farage, of course). It’s a curious bunch for contemplating what is happening on the right of UK politics.
Farage is the obvious one – he first met Trump way back in 2016. Long before Reform was even an idea, Farage was trading off his personal friendship with the 45th president – who could forget that photo of the pair in front of the golden doors at Trump Tower the week after the 2016 presidential election?
Farage very nearly eschewed the 2024 UK general election entirely, on the grounds that the US election was more important than anything happening in Britain. He pitched the idea of himself as the UK’s ambassador to the US, saying he would be “useful as an interlocutor” with the Trump White House. So the photos of Farage swanning around Washington DC this week, posing at a Trump rally or with the White House in the background, are hardly surprising.
The Farage mission is essentially to trade on dissatisfaction with both of the UK’s main parties, offering up Reform as the only real alternative. Both Trump campaigns are full of lessons of how insurgents can play the anti-establishment card to huge success, plus his closeness with the new president offers ample publicity opportunity.
More interestingly, what were Liz Truss and Suella Braverman doing there?
The two women were not exactly ideological allies back when they were in government together. A row over immigration proved the precursor to Braverman’s sacking/resignation (delete as appropriate) from the short-lived Truss cabinet. Still, post-Truss Braverman seemed to believe that she was the natural successor to take over from Rishi Sunak, using her time as his home secretary to undermine his authority and openly campaign for his job. But somewhere along the way, she lost her credibility with the party: when the leadership contest formerly began, Braverman’s bid failed before it even started. She holds no role on Badenoch’s front bench, and is considered irrelevant by most of her remaining colleagues in parliament.
As for Truss, she’s not in parliament at all, having lost her seat in one of the 2024 election’s most dramatic “Portillo moments”. She has spent her time since leaving Downing Street reinventing herself as the British poster girl of the so-called “New Right”. Gone is the Liz Truss whose free-market economic liberalism allowed her to be relaxed about open borders and a champion for globalisation. Enter the Liz Truss who speaks at the Trump-aligned Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) (whose slogan is, “Where globalism goes to die”) and courts Trump’s circle with little concern that his headline tariff policy is an affront to the concept of free trade she used to champion.
It’s not clear what Truss’s endgame is here. Perhaps, as one ex-aide put it, she is fighting for “Trussism without Truss”, orbiting the Trump movement as a means of staying relevant so there is space for her ideas to be discussed within the party she briefly led, even if she herself has been rejected by most former colleagues. Or perhaps the reinvention is more dramatic. Rumours swirl that Reform is looking to recruit big-name Conservatives who lost their seats in July. Ideologically, Truss didn’t used to be much of a fit for populists who want net-zero immigration and to nationalise key British industries, but times have changed. Truss attended Farage’s birthday party in April (to which Trump sent birthday wishes video message), along with Andrea Jenkyns who defected to Reform last year.
Truss and Braverman (who is also rumoured to be considering a switch to Reform) both represent a direction the Conservative Party could yet choose to pursue: one that tries to replicate Trump’s revamping of the Republican Party over here with a similar call to “Make Britain Great Again”, by going to war with institutions both at home and overseas, and in particular taking the hardest possible line against immigration to neutralise Reform. That isn’t the line the actual leader of the Conservatives has so far wanted to take (perhaps aware of how it could drive centre-right voters in the UK even further away). The presence of two former Tory heavyweights at the inauguration, plus Farage who is set on destroying the Conservative Party altogether, sends a message to Kemi Badenoch.
But then there is Boris Johnson, the only British political figure invited inside the Rotunda itself, who is understood to still be on close terms with Trump and to chat with him regularly. The Conservatives are still reeling from the impact his drawn-out departure had on their credibility and the failures of his time in office – it is Johnson’s changes on immigration policy that led to the spike the Tory party is currently having to apologise for. Unlike Truss, Johnson hasn’t been popping up all over the place trying to set the record straight. But maybe the power of the 2019 election victory, however dramatically it melted away, means he doesn’t need to.
Johnson’s presence watching Trump take the presidential oath for a second time sends a different message to the Tories back home: remember what electoral success looks like? Maybe the lesson from Trump’s second win was less about policy, more about personality. And who has more personality than Boris Johnson? He is still toxic to a substantial faction of electorate, his party is struggling to undo the damage he did, and rumours in the past of a political comeback have consistently proved exaggerated. But for the those on the UK right looking stateside for ideas of how to move forward from their worse ever election defeat, it’s a reminder that the Tory party used to have an answer to Nigel Farage. Much food for thought for Kemi Badenoch, and those around her.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.
[See also: Has Biden buried the American left?]
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