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A few months ago, Kemi Badenoch, 45, commended JD Vance for “dropping some truth bombs”. What possesses an aspiring UK prime minister to speak like a teenage YouTube provocateur in a Texas basement? Badenoch is older than Tony Blair and David Cameron were when they entered Number 10. If there is one thing to be said in defence of her tone, it is this: the substance was worse.
Vance had all but endorsed the German hard right on German soil on the eve of a federal election there. He cited curbs on free speech as the real threat to Europe while Ukrainians died under (literal) bombs. If this is Badenoch’s account of truth, she deserves electoral rebuke that goes beyond the local elections on Thursday.
Events in Canada suggest it will come in time. US-worship outside the US used to be merely weird. It now seems a political liability. The fate of Canada’s Conservatives, who have just lost a near-unlosable election, in part through association with Donald Trump, should spook their sibling party in the UK.
Sixteen per cent of Brits have a favourable opinion of Trump, according to YouGov. Thirteen per cent approve of Elon Musk. Even the subset who voted for the Tories in their landslide defeat last summer think almost exactly as the wider public does about both men. As for Vance, his positive rating doesn’t get into double figures. And this is before Britain experiences the surge in inflation or the slowdown in growth (or both) that might result from US tariffs.
Short of cultivating Bashar al-Assad, the Tories could not be on to a bigger vote-loser than consorting with Maga. As a Labour prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer has some moral licence to do it: people know that he is going against all his instincts to drum up some bilateral trade for Britain, or to keep the US engaged in Ukraine. But a party of the right? One that would be seen, fairly or not, to be embracing Trump out of enthusiasm not necessity? Pierre Poilievre is available to advise on the risks.
The Tories face a choice. It is between Trump — which means, for the foreseeable future, America — and electoral viability. Being associated with him wasn’t so toxic during his first term or his period out of power. But to keep up the comradeship now, as his world-shaking second act upsets people everywhere, is to more or less forfeit votes. A lot of British Tories understand this intellectually but can’t break the habit of a near-decade, or their much longer-standing bondage to America.
And so most deny the dilemma. Britain isn’t Canada, they say, whose economy is uniquely exposed to US tariffs. A British Conservative can still get away with flattery and imitation of Trump that would doom a Canadian one as unpatriotic. Well, I can name around 400 Labour MPs who would encourage the Tories to test this proposition. If anything, British voters, being in the same continent as Russia, have a more life-and-death reason to dislike Trump and his foreign policy than Canadians do. (Unless you think he will make good on his “51st state” threats with a northbound tank column.) A parliamentary system, a trade-to-GDP ratio of 65-ish per cent: there are enough parallels between the Canadian and British scenes to warrant some Tory dread.
Renouncing Trump would discomfit Badenoch’s Conservatives more than any centre-right party in any anglophone democracy. This is because a UK that has less to do with the US will need to have more to do with Europe: as an economic cushion and a military recourse. At frequent intervals now, Starmer makes an accommodation with the EU — one on youth migration is in the works — to almost no controversy at all. Just 30 per cent of voters think Brexit has gone well. More than four years have passed since a plurality did. None of this means that re-entry is in the offing, but the benefit of the doubt is plainly with those seeking a thaw. Whenever the Tories object, Labour can ask them to name the alternative. “Hug the US closer”? Really?
Populist voters in Britain are not the same as in America. Trump has prominent billionaire backers. That would likelier cost a politician support in Europe. Trump wants to cut the federal government. Populism in the old world tends to be so statist as to overlap with the hard left. (The most resonant case against the EU during the 2016 referendum was to spend the membership dues on the NHS.) The religious fringe of the Trump movement is a slight electoral drag even in America, hence the short leash on which he keeps abortion hardliners. In the UK, a place so godless that churches find themselves cheering a dead cat bounce in attendance numbers, a Christianist platform wouldn’t survive first contact with the public.
I’d go further than “not the same”. Unless their countries have little to do with each other, no two nationalist movements can coexist on a lasting basis. The belligerence of one will end up being directed at the other, which must then fight back or look weak. In failing to distance himself from Trump, Poilievre achieved an amazing effect: jingoism on behalf of another country. His defeat should warn the right around the world that liberals can now attack their patriotic credentials. In its own way, Badenoch’s line about Vance was a masterpiece of modern Toryism: praise for an American politician, in an American idiom, on an American platform. Only the electoral reckoning will be British.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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