On the day Russia and the US began peace talks without the presence of Ukraine, Kemi Badenoch was appearing at the right-wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London, alongside a Donald Trump cabinet member and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives. In her speech she praised Trump for consistently “telling the truth”.
In a follow-up interview with the American journalist Bari Weiss, Badenoch claimed that Elon Musk’s project to tear up the US government was “not radical enough” for the UK. And she thanked JD Vance for “dropping truth bombs” in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he claimed barriers to free speech were a bigger problem for Europe than Russian aggression.
As political strategies go, cosying up to the Trump administration feels risky, to put it mildly. The US president’s approval rating in the UK is minus 41. Musk’s is even worse, at minus 46. It seems likely these scores will fall further as the economic and geopolitical chaos unleashed by the new US administration starts to hit our lives harder.
Part of the explanation lies in Badenoch’s genuine beliefs. She really does agree with much of what Vance and Musk say—all three have been subject to the same online influences and see “woke” professional bureaucracies as the enemy of progress. You have to be pretty far down the ideological rabbit hole to agree to be interviewed, as she was recently, by tedious controversialist Konstantin Kisin. This is a man who recently asked of Rishi Sunak: “He’s a brown Hindu, how is he English?”
Insofar as there is any strategic thinking here, though, it’s in chasing after Reform voters—the one group that has a net positive view of Trump. The motivation for doing this is understandable, given the Tories are now languishing in third place in polling averages, behind Reform, on around 20 per cent. It’s hard to see a route to victory that doesn’t involve getting some of Nigel Farage’s supporters back.
But attempting to do so in such an unsubtle way seems certain to alienate not just Labour and Liberal Democrat voters who could in theory vote for the Tories, but also existing Conservative voters, the large majority of whom dislike Trump and Musk. These voters’ social conservatism is primarily about risk aversion, a fear of uncontrolled immigration, unpunished crime and disrespect for authority. The revolutionary authoritarianism of the online right, in which Badenoch has got herself caught up, is anathema to people who just want a quiet life.
To win a majority, Badenoch needs to take back prosperous southern seats that used to be solidly Tory but are now Lib Dem or Labour. In an interview at the ARC conference, with the celebrity cod psychologist Jordan Peterson, she complained that Lib Dem MPs were just people who were “good at fixing their church roof”. Which is exactly what the Tories used to be, when they held those seats.
Voters in these places want cautious economic policy, solid patriotism and functioning public services. They don’t want fervid attacks on globalists and the World Health Organisation. The route to winning back Basingstoke does not run through Elon Musk’s X feed.
At the same time, the Tories are also failing to win back Reform voters. As a group they vastly prefer Farage and have little time for Conservative promises after the last 14 years. They are also economically way to the left of Badenoch, whose Thatcherite capitalism and interest in privatising public services is in stark contrast to their belief that big business is part of the problem. (Though the lack of an economic message is also an issue for Farage and Reform.)
The problem becomes obvious whenever Badenoch is confronted with the question of why someone who agreed with her views should choose the Tory party over the “full fat” version offered by Reform. She’s left babbling about experience (of which she has almost none) and her desire to fix things rather than break them. When asked the question by Peterson, she ended up saying that she understands the system while Reform just “want to burn it down”. But that’s precisely what many Reform voters want.
All of which means that Badenoch has entangled her party, even more thoroughly than it already was, in a trap it set itself—that is, continuing to lose more moderate voters while failing to win those who want a radical right offering. It’s a trap into which many European centre-right parties have fallen, finding themselves in third or fourth place behind far-right parties.
Unless Reform implodes—which is always possible with Farage-run parties—it may already be too late for the Tories to escape the trap. They may ultimately be forced into a merger, even if that’s very unlikely to happen this side of another general election. But if the Conservatives are to free themselves, it won’t be under Badenoch’s leadership. They need someone who can speak to Aldershot rather than the alt-right.
