At her first PMQs as opposition leader, a few days after Donald Trump’s second election victory, Kemi Badenoch asked Keir Starmer whether he would “extend an invitation to President Trump to address parliament on his next visit”.
It was a curious choice. Awarding Trump this privilege, you imagine, was not a priority of voters in the 251 seats the Conservatives lost at the last election. But Badenoch’s intent was clear: to signal her ideological allegiance to the US right and to exploit Labour’s foreign policy divisions.
The Tory leader attempted the same move yesterday when she cited Trump’s splenetic tweets over the return of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. In doing so, she only gifted Starmer a chance to put some patriotic distance between himself and the US: “The words from President Trump were expressly intended to put pressure on me to yield on my principles,” he riposted (note the Churchillian resonance of “yield”). “What he said about Chagos was literally in the same sentence as what he said about Greenland. That was his purpose.” It was, in perhaps unlikely circumstances, viewed by Labour MPs as one of Starmer’s best performances since the election.
For the British right, Trump is closer to an electoral albatross than an asset. There is sometimes a tendency to assume that public opinion on the President amounts to a Brexit-style 52:48 split. In reality, even before the events of this week, dislike of Trump had a rare capacity to unite the electorate. Eighty one per cent of voters, including 70 per cent of Conservative supporters and 49 per cent of Reform supporters, have an unfavourable opinion of the President. As Canada’s Pierre Poilievre and Australia’s Peter Dutton – caught beneath liberal landslides – can testify, affinity with Trump is a dangerous thing.
It’s a lesson a surprising number still haven’t learned. Nigel Farage, who might have wanted to hedge a little at this point, declared last night at Davos’s US House that the world would be a “better, more secure place” if America took over Greenland. Only on the British right, as European populists flee for safer ground, is fealty to Trump still treated as an ideological virility test.
Yet alternative traditions are available. It was Enoch Powell, an admirer of Charles de Gaulle, who was the quintessential Americosceptic Tory. After the US equivocated between the UK and Argentina during the early stages of the Falklands War, Powell 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”. In 2003, 16 Conservative MPs, including Ken Clarke, voted against the Iraq war. Rather than being the last guests at the Trump party, the right could use this moment to ponder what a truly sovereignist foreign and defence policy would look like.
As it is, to adapt the title of Tomiwa Owolade’s fine book, too many forget that Britain is not America. An electorate that thinks European has always had little time for libertarian economic policy or reactionary social policy. It has still less time for the notion that the UK can have no higher ambition than to turn Downing Street into a Maga embassy. During the 1980s, the right’s victories were buttressed by the far left’s neutrality or sympathy towards the Soviet Union. Enraptured by Trump’s new American empire, conservatives risk falling into the same trap.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: We are living through regime change]
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Subscribe here to commentVery interesting piece. The Right are beginning [I think] to see that Trump is simply a user, he’d turn on a Farage or Badenoch government in a second