After years of provoking controversy with a take-no-prisoners approach to politics, a combative Right-winger has been thrust onto a new stage after an election triumph.
That would be Kemi Badenoch, who was gifted a juicy opportunity to goad Sir Keir Starmer at their first session of Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday hours after Donald Trump won a stunning victory in the White House race.
Badenoch was speaking at PMQs for the first time as Leader of the Opposition, making history as the first black head of a UK political party after she beat Robert Jenrick in the lower-profile Conservative leadership race.
US voters opted not to make history by electing the mixed-race Kamala Harris as their first woman president. Instead they went back to the future with Trump and rejected Labour’s sister party, the Democrats (despite the dubious help offered to Harris from Labour volunteers).
Torcuil Crichton, Labour’s new MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, surely betrayed what many on his benches will have felt getting up to the news from over the Atlantic.
Crichton offered reluctant endorsement of Sir Keir’s congratulations to the president-elect, noting the Scottish roots of Trump’s mother on the Isle of Lewis in his Outer Hebrides constituency, “although I wish I'd woken up today on the Isle of Harris" next door.
Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy have worked to build bridges with Team Trump, sitting down for a two-hour dinner with the 45th (and incoming 47th) president in late September in New York.
Badenoch added her own congratulations to Trump, and enquired whether Lammy had apologised at the dinner for once calling him a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”.
If not, she mused, would Sir Keir care to say sorry now? And would he be happy to invite the next president to address Parliament, after MPs now on the Labour frontbench petitioned to block such a ceremonial visit during Trump’s first White House term?
The PM swatted aside Badenoch’s interjections, accusing her of sticking to a prepared script as Labour MPs jeered at the new Tory chief for breaking Commons protocol by reading from her notes.
She was accusing Sir Keir of pursuing “copy and paste Bidenomics” and warned that unless he changed course on the economy, he would also become a “one-term leader”.
Trump’s victory does threaten to make life more awkward for the new PM, but Sir Keir stressed the deeper “special relationship” that binds Britain and the United States, which has survived testing times before.
And unlike Joe Biden, the PM can look forward to years more in office.
Badenoch will be hoping too for a period of stability to rebuild the Conservatives in opposition and not end up being “this week’s Tory leader”, in the words of Neil Coyle, the Labour MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, as he pointed to the party’s record for regicide of late.
That came after Sir Keir offered a barbed welcome to his new opposite number as she sat flanked by new shadow chancellor Mel Stride and shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel (who was previously forced out of Theresa May’s Cabinet for indulging in freelance diplomacy with Israeli ministers).
The PM said: “My fourth Tory leader in four-and-a-half years, but I do look forward to working with her in the interests of the British public.”
