Anglo-American Entente

Part Two: Parsing Britain's Changed Political Scene

The Rt Hon Mrs. Kemi Badenoch is the Conservative MP for North West Essex, and has been an MP continually since 8 June 2017. She currently undertakes the role of Leader of HM Official Opposition. In addition, she is Leader of the Conservative Party.

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Politics in the United Kingdom and the United States have taken some (to deploy this season’s adjective of choice) weird turns. The situation in the U.S. has been exhaustingly — obsessively — explored.

Great Britain’s twists have been comparably strange by modern historical standards, so this is an effort to explain them for an American readership, with apologies to those who may find it a bit didactic.

In 2016, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron (a graduate of Eton and Oxford, which is to say, in the classic mold of Tory leaders) called a referendum to decide — once and for all — whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union. On June 23, a majority of the voters chose Brexit, “leave” over “remain.”

Cameron resigned and was followed by four other Conservatives in eight years, all ousted, the most notable being Boris Johnson (also a graduate of Eton and Oxford) whose flamboyance eventually became intolerable, ostensibly because of parties held at 10 Downing Street during the Covid lockdown.

Then came Rishi Sunak (another Oxford alumnus) who was born in England of South Asian parents, is Hindu, and is married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire. In the 2024 general elections, after fourteen years in power, the Tories were trounced by Labour.

Following the election defeat, the Conservative party’s members selected as their leader Kemi Badenoch (a lawyer with degrees from the universities of Sussex and London). She was born in 1980 in London, to Nigerian parents who moved back to Nigeria shortly after her birth. She returned to Britain at the age of sixteen because of the hardship of life in Nigeria. She is adamantly far right-wing in ideology. She is Black and anti-immigration.

This is the party of Winston Churchill et al., so the ascension of two persons of color to leadership represents a remarkable transition. I lived in London in the 1960s, and Cypriots (whether of Greek or Turkish origins) were then considered colored, which meant social status below whites in a class conscious society.

The population of the United Kingdom is now almost 20 percent composed of “minority” ethnic backgrounds. The old slur “the wogs begin at Calais,” just across the English Channel in France, no longer applies. But Badenoch is off to a rocky start in polling — and that, as far as it is possible to detect, has nothing to do with race.

Instead, her standing reflects the prevailing British attitude toward politicians of all sorts. The London Times columnist Hugo Rifkind noted that Badenoch’s poor ratings were better than those of the new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, “a bit like suggesting that the public prefers death by sharks to death by bees.”

Describing the political scene, Rifkind wrote: “Perhaps, in an age of populist promises, this is the cost. To win is to lie, and to serve is to disappoint. What if this is just how it works now? What if we never like anything, ever again?”

Following the 2024 elections, Labour has 402 members of Parliament while the Conservatives have 121, with many other smaller parties also winning seats. Labour’s share of the total popular vote was only 33.7 percent, meaning that its mandate was far less sweeping than it may have appeared.

I covered the British elections in 1983, when Margaret Thatcher ran against Michael Foot, a scholarly left-winger who told me that he had not been in the United States since 1953. Imagining him as a partner to Ronald Reagan was absurd, and he lost decisively.

More than a decade later, the Labour party moved to the center, and Tony Blair became prime minister. His style and his affinity with Bill Clinton, followed by his support for George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, led the prominent British journalist James Naughtie to write a book called The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency. When Blair aligned Britain behind George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the electorate’s mood darkened.

In recent years, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reverted to the far-left politics of Foot, with an uglier edge. Party policies were called “Stalinist” by opponents, and antisemitism, though denied, was clearly present among the party’s leadership and members.

Sir Keir Starmer, a knighted lawyer, represents a shift back toward the center left. His wife is Jewish and attends synagogue. Confronted with a raft of economic problems — and now the restored presidency of Donald Trump — the Starmer years will likely be fraught. On the other hand, the ideological swings in the Labour Party have precedents.

There is really nothing in the Tory past to prepare for the age of Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch.

What about the rest of the political scene? It’s worth remembering that while England and Wales are governed from Westminster, the seat of the House of Commons and the largely marginal House of Lords, a process of devolution has given Scotland and Northern Ireland major control of their regional governments. Even so, national policy and international affairs are still directed from Westminster.

The pro-independence Scottish National Party was increasingly powerful and theoretically could have chosen to remain in the European Union if it had achieved its goal of full political separation from England. But scandals in the party ranks have undermined its influence.

In American terms, think of “states’ rights” in what is a United Kingdom — which in Northern Ireland means the possibility someday of a unified Ireland and a revived breakaway movement in Scotland. To call everyone in Great Britain “English,” as is so often done on this side of the Atlantic, is not actually right.

Unlike the European countries, where many parliaments are comprised of multiple parties according to their proportional results in elections, often leading to coalition governments, British MPs — like our members of Congress — are people who win in their local contests.

The UK’s major third party, which has gone through several iterations and name changes, is the Liberal Democrats, with seventy-two members in Parliament. My sense has been that when Labour swings far left and the Conservatives veer far right (the meaning of which has changed over the years), there are many moderates whose votes don’t count unless they can muster a majority in their constituency. It is in those times that the Liberal Democrats gain strength and influence.

Sinn Fein, which originated as the political arm of the Irish Republican Army that battled the British for decades — the violent era known as the “Troubles” — has seven members. The Reform UK party, whose most prominent figure, Nigel Farage, is (my term) a mini-me of Donald Trump’s rambunctious style, has five.

The reality is that British domestic politics has no meaningful impact on the United States. But there is an alliance on security matters that extends to nuclear policies and the embedded cultural affinities that come from a lingua franca, English.

Still, the time-honored rituals of Parliament have a definite following in America; think of “hear, hear!” among other expressions of favor or contempt. For years, the Sunday night airing on C-SPAN of Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons was one of its most watched programs. It was certainly entertaining.