A little more than five hours after Fox News called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump at 6:47am London time, signalling that the 45th US president would also be the 47th, Kemi Badenoch made her debut at PMQs – and sought immediately to embarrass Keir Starmer by asking if he would apologise for David Lammy’s description of Trump in 2018 as a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”.
This was pure political theatre. The government does indeed have ground to make up with the president-elect – whose campaign lawyers sent a six-page letter to the US Federal Election Commission on October 21, demanding an urgent investigation into “blatant foreign interference in the 2024 Presidential Election” by Labour activists sent to campaign for Kamala Harris in battleground states.
But six-year-old tweets by Lammy are not the real issue. Indeed, Starmer sensibly despatched the then Shadow Foreign Secretary on a series of goodwill missions to Trumpland before both the UK and US elections, where Lammy forged an especially strong working alliance with vice-president elect J.D. Vance.
Much more pressing are substantial questions of policy. At the Treasury select committee yesterday, Rachel Reeves insisted that the UK will not be “a passive actor” in the formulation of new US-UK trade rules, and that, mindful of Trump’s love of tariffs, she would make “strong representations” to the new administration about the perils of protectionism. Well, that should do the trick.
On defence spending, the future of Nato, international collaboration on climate change, Ukraine and Iran, Trump’s return presents Starmer and his colleagues with a series of policy dilemmas. Already outside the EU and confronted now with a zealously “America First” president-elect, the UK faces a potentially lonely path.
No less interesting is the impact that Trump’s astonishing return will have upon right-of-centre politics in this country. For a start, Nigel Farage has an undoubted opportunity to turbo-charge Reform UK’s success in the general election and to present himself — plausibly — as the favoured point-man of the new White House in Europe: rivalled only by Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orban.
The MAGA movement has not only colonised the US Republican Party and transformed the GOP into a dynastic fiefdom of the Trump family. It has also established itself as a global franchise, a network of parties and groups all over the world committed to nationalist populism.
In May 2023, the National Conservatism summit in London effectively founded the UK branch of this loose-knit Internationale of the Right: the star turn at the gathering was Vance, and among the Conservatives who took part were Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Suella Braverman (remember her?).
Conspicuous by her absence was Badenoch, already a tribune of the Tory right but reluctant even then to be caricatured as a prospective branch manager of the MAGA global syndicate. Naturally, she will be keen to establish good relations with the newly ascendant Republican hierarchy – and has already established a friendship with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who recorded a campaign video for her during the Tory leadership contest.
Yet, unlike Robert Jenrick whom she defeated in the final round of that race, she sees pitfalls in unvarnished support for the president-elect. During her stint as a London assembly member, she tweeted that she was “not a Trump fan”. More recently, one of her allies told me that she was not drawn by the culture of MAGA and Trump’s rallies: “Kemi doesn’t want that red baseball cap vibe at all”.
Why would voters want diluted Farage-ism when they can have the full-fat, leaded version?
This caution is shrewd. The cult of personality that the president-elect has nurtured in the nine years since he announced his first candidacy would scarcely suit the shattered Conservative party, reduced to a paltry 121 MPs and facing years of laborious reconstruction. Badenoch is an abrasive debater. But she is not an instinctive demagogue.
Yet that is not the end of the matter. Her party will look longingly across the Atlantic and yearn for the impact, reach and popular appeal that Trump has achieved. As Farage boasts of his links to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, the pressure upon Badenoch to follow suit will grow.
The Conservative leader is right that her party’s path back to plausibility is not to offer the electorate Reform-lite: Nigel without the nonsense. Why would voters want diluted Farage-ism when they can have the full-fat, leaded version? That is a competition that the Tories cannot win.
But Badenoch’s members and some of her MPs will not agree. No less than Starmer, she faces a strategic headache after Trump’s triumph. It is the same all over the world. Everything has changed.
Matthew d’Ancona is a London Standard columnist
