Kemi Badenoch is being urged not to “fall into a populist trap” by pulling the Conservative party too close to Donald Trump amid a mounting debate among senior Tories about how the party can learn from the president-elect’s decisive victory.
Badenoch used her first outing at prime minister’s questions as Tory leader to highlight the disparaging remarks made about Trump by foreign secretary David Lammy before suggesting Trump would be thanking the Labour activists who travelled to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris.
However, the intervention has caused some concerns among liberal Tories, who are warning Badenoch against aligning herself too closely with Trump’s success. “I thought she fell into a populist trap,” said one former cabinet minister. “We need to think carefully about the fact that we lost the election to the left. We didn’t lose the election to the right – we lost seats to the Lib Dems and Labour.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of love for Trump in Conservative target margins. If you’re trying to win seats back in Surrey, Cheltenham, Somerset, I’m not sure Trumpism is the right alternative.”
Badenoch has generally been less effusive about Trump than her leadership rival Robert Jenrick, who declared he would vote for him if he were an American citizen. Her team has no immediate plans to meet figures close to Trump. However, she plans to keep pressuring Starmer to reopen shelved US trade deal talks.
Another former Tory minister said it would be a mistake to shift towards the populist politics Trump has embraced. “The fact remains that a small percentage of people in the UK think Donald Trump should be US president – he is spectacularly unpopular over here,” they said. “What is the political motivation for us lining up with him? I don’t understand the strategy.
“Trump won by Biden being spectacularly unpopular and people feeling that inflation was killing them. That’s also why we lost. We are Joe Biden in this scenario.
“I’m not sure the Trump playbook imported to the UK makes the Tory party look more credible.”
Senior figures are also concerned that Trump will attempt to do what he can to boost the popularity of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the wake of his victory. Farage, who has long burnished his close relationship with Trump, attended a victory party in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, last week. Several senior Tories described it as a “legitimate concern”.
One former cabinet minister on the right said it should reopen the debate about whether Farage should be persuaded to join the Tory party. “The political leverage that Farage has got as a consequence of the election of Trump is immense,” they said. “Every time he jets across the Atlantic and has a one-to-one meeting with Donald for an hour, he makes both the prime minister and leader of the opposition look particularly weak.”
Giles Dilnot, editor of ConservativeHome website, said the Tories could learn from Trump’s victory – including his authenticity and his campaign’s willingness to listen to the concerns of voters. However, he said there were real differences over issues such as tariffs and Ukraine that should not be ignored.
“[The Ukraine] debate is about using what contacts we have with Republicans to make the case that Reagan wouldn’t force an unacceptable deal on Ukraine,” he said. “On tariffs, it is about making the argument for global free trade, and that won’t necessarily chime with what Trump wants to do. So it’s picking those areas where we can make a cogent argument and trying to relay that in helpful criticism to Republicans in America.
“While you may find real Trumpism among a lot of Reform voices on social media, I don’t think the Conservative party will do that. Some of the populist ideas from Reform are simply impractical and ill thought through.”
