Joe Biden’s presidency left no lasting imprint on British politics and culture. Labour embraced “Bidenomics” as a model of state intervention. Conservatives chafed at the president’s Irish sympathies. But most voters were untroubled by his existence (save perhaps for his unusual age and frailty).
Donald Trump is the other kind of US president. The kind who is omnipresent in domestic politics, who opens new divides and who musicians write protest songs against (Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief and Morrissey’s “America is Not the World” are emblems of the George W Bush era).
Trump’s second presidency only began 44 days ago but it has already reshaped British debate (a YouGov poll shows favourability towards the US among UK voters has fallen by 12 points). One’s views on the president and his frat-boy sidekick JD Vance have become an efficient political litmus test.
Liberal disdain for Trump is familiar from his first election in 2016, though it is more muted this time around (owing to the margin of the president’s victory and the retreat of the Brexit wars). What is more notable is that some of the most pointed criticisms of Trump have come not from the left but from the right.
“For the sake of our national dignity, the Prime Minister should now ask the King to withdraw this invitation, which was made in good faith and accepted – in public – in what turned out to be bad faith,” declared the Mail on Sunday of Trump’s planned second state visit. Alicia Kearns, the shadow home affairs minister, advanced the same argument: “State visits should be conferred to the most honourable of allies, not to curry favour.” Robert Jenrick, the Tory leader-in-waiting, declared that Winston Churchill would be “turning in his grave” at the sight of Trump’s onslaught against Volodymr Zelensky.
Vance’s rhetorical sally against “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 years” – treated as a slight against the UK – has had a similar effect. “‘Clown’ Vance’s slur on 636 war heroes,” runs the headline of today’s Daily Express, referencing the number of British troops who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Vance is wrong, wrong, wrong,” boomed Nigel Farage. (Kemi Badenoch, displaying her unerring ability to put herself on the wrong side of the British public, defended Vance.)
These interventions and front pages are shared excitedly by liberals who cry that Trump has even lost the right. But the surprise is that anyone should be surprised Middle England has never liked being taken for granted by the Yanks. Americoscepticism has a far richer pedigree on the right than it does on the left.
To traditional conservatives, the US was the upstart power that connived in the decline of Britain’s empire while assembling its own. They were never content to play “Greece to their Rome” (as Harold Macmillan put it). Liberals, for equal and opposite reasons, welcomed the US as a bastion of democracy.
It was Enoch Powell – newly in vogue among the young online right – who was the quintessential anti-American conservative (and an admirer of the similarly sceptical Charles de Gaulle). After the US equivocated between the UK and Argentina during the early stages of the Falklands War, he spoke of a “great liberation” in which “the scales fell from the eyes of the British public and they beheld the United States not in the fairy-tale disguise sustained so sedulously since 1942 but as that nation really is”. For some conservatives, Vance’s comments had a similarly demystifying effect.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Powell argued that the UK should remain on the sidelines, declaring that “Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops come storming up the beaches of Kent or Sussex”.
Glimmers of this isolationist tradition were occasionally witnessed during the 2003 Iraq War – 16 Tory MPs, including Ken Clarke, voted against intervention. Commentators such as Peter Oborne, Peter Hitchens and Geoffrey Wheatcroft indicted Tony Blair on conservative grounds. But the prevailing tone was set by Americophiles such as George Osborne and Liam Fox, who were sometimes bigger cheerleaders for the war than Labour itself.
Trump’s presidency, however, will see the rebirth of a dormant political species – the Americosceptic Tory. Should Keir Starmer’s closeness to Trump persist, the natural logic of opposition will guarantee it. The dominance of US Big Tech has already prompted the likes of Farage to inveigh against America’s economic hegemony. As Britain’s reliance on the US becomes ever clearer, don’t be surprised if conservatives decide that it’s time for a declaration of independence.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: The provocations of Enoch Powell]
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