The House of Commons is built for confrontation, with rows of benches facing each other across an aisle. When the original Victorian chamber was blitzed to ashes during the second world war, Winston Churchill was adamant that the antagonistic geometry be preserved in the restoration. He spoke dismissively of the foreign, semi-circular assembly, which “enables every individual or every group to move round the centre, adopting various shades of pink according as the weather changes.”
Churchill was leading a national unity government, but that was a wartime expedient. Normal democratic hostilities resumed as soon as Germany surrendered. MPs might rebel against their whips, or even defect, but it takes a national calamity or international crisis for Labour and Tory leaders to declare themselves on the same side.
Donald Trump’s inauguration later this month isn’t an emergency of that kind, but it makes one more likely. The incoming president respects neither democratic principle nor diplomatic convention. America will still be an essential ally to Britain, but not a reliable one. The relationship will be shaped by petulance, surprise and ultimatum.
That will make the prime minister’s job incredibly difficult. It will also test the official opposition. There is no natural affinity between Keir Starmer, the liberal-left human rights lawyer, and Trump. But doing business with unpalatable partners in the national interest is in his job description. Kemi Badenoch’s challenge, as leader of the country’s oldest-established party of the right, is more subtle. She doesn’t have the pressure of running foreign policy, but she does have a constitutional role and a duty to British democracy.
How Badenoch responds to Maga mania radiating across the Atlantic matters because she is the gatekeeper of mainstream conservatism. She has a choice: police the boundary where reputable Tory tradition shades into racially aggravated nationalism, or hasten the dissolution of that line.
Her preference is signalled by the decision to endorse attacks on the government over child abuse cases in the terms dictated by far-right conspiracy theorists, amplified by Elon Musk. The core allegation is of a cover-up, and it is false. There was an inquiry with a report published in 2022. Labour’s choice not to hold another inquiry when recommendations of the first one are still being implemented is the same decision the Tories made when they were in government.
Anyone who has met Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, knows she is an independent-spirited veteran defender of the rights of women and girls against sexual violence. Any politician who isn’t viscerally appalled by Musk’s absurd and grotesque description of Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” can be disqualified from the debate. (Nigel Farage says it was a fair exercise of free speech.)
Anyone who listened to Starmer’s defence of Phillips on Monday could tell he was venting genuine and justified anger at a dangerous and cynical campaign of misinformation. (Badenoch accuses the prime minister of “smear tactics”.)
No party leader who is interested in one day governing on behalf of every British citizen could endorse the view expressed by Robert Jenrick, shadow justice secretary, that the real problems are multiculturalism, men of Pakistani origin and “importing … people from alien cultures”. Badenoch appears to share that analysis.
An instructive comparison can be made with a lucid rebuttal that former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve posted on X, dismantling one of Musk’s attacks on Starmer’s record as director of public prosecutions. “Baseless innuendo does not contribute to serious debate,” Grieve concluded. Indeed not, but it harvests clicks.
Grieve was one of 21 Tory MPs who had the whip withdrawn in 2019 as punishment for voting to obstruct a no-deal Brexit. He represents the tradition of centre-right liberal Conservatism that was once a doctrinal pillar of the party but is now anathematised as remainer heresy.
Curiously, Badenoch describes herself as a “classic liberal”, but in her idiosyncratic usage that means crusading against imagined leftwing infiltration of the public sector. She has declared herself “excited” by the prospect of what Musk will do for an incoming Trump administration as head of a newly created Department of Government Efficiency. She predicts that “it will be absolutely brilliant.”
That enthusiasm prevents the Tory leader voicing qualms when the tech billionaire calls for Britain to be liberated “from their tyrannical government” and for the prime minister to be jailed. Musk doesn’t speak for the incoming US president, but his trolling malevolence contains enough Trumpian spirit to serve as a warning of what politics might look like in the coming years.
Full-frontal opposition is the engine of accountability in British politics. But there is a parallel tradition of collegiate bipartisanship when more is at stake than scoring a cheap point; when, for example, mendacious personal attacks on the prime minister by a powerful foreign oligarch look like systematic interference in the democratic process.
The last few days have been a test for Badenoch. She could have opted for serious opposition. She could have understood that her job includes a responsibility not to debase political discourse, not to propagate wild inflammatory rhetoric, not to tacitly endorse calls for the overthrow of the government. Or she could hitch a ride on a far-right internet bandwagon as it rattled past, without pausing to consider where it might carry her or the country. She made her choice.
It was a peculiar decision for the leader of a party that boasts of its organic connection to the institutions and habits of British democracy; the party of Churchill. But that isn’t Badenoch’s party. It just shares the name. Hers is a newer, shorter lineage. She hails from the House of Brexit, the natural successor to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in a tradition defined by incoherent bombast, culture war performance, policy as gimmick, intellectual vacuity clad in libertarian verbiage.
Badenoch may not know it, but the pattern of her leadership is set. The trajectory is all too familiar. It is the path of least moral resistance, gravitating inexorably rightwards, laundering fanaticism through the mainstream Conservative brand, striving to make the unacceptable sound respectable.
