Britain’s desperate need for Keir Badenoch

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In those bygone days that we call March 2026, Nigel Farage welcomed the Iran war. Kemi Badenoch all but called Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer a coward for not supporting it. A good deal of the conservative pundit class cheered the missile strikes as children cheer fireworks. Because the subsequent intellectual retreat has been smoother than Homer Simpson’s into that garden hedge, their complicity might be forgotten as the war starts to make Britons poorer. And because Starmer botched an ambassadorial appointment, it might get lost that he has had one truly major foreign judgment to make — over Iran — and judged well. 

The British right is not to be trusted with foreign policy. It is still masochistically deferent to the US. It is still hostile to the EU, with which economic logic and public opinion demand closer British involvement. It is still taking a vague “stand” against China, even as peer nations cultivate the second superpower as a geoeconomic hedge against America. Badenoch, who picks the oddest of battles, marched against the new London embassy of the People’s Republic.

This unseriousness about the world infects, and might even emanate from, the wider conservative movement. I shouldn’t trouble readers with the economics of journalism, but it is worth knowing that Maga voters, being numerous and English-speaking, have become a lucrative audience for UK-based outlets. The distorting effect on British conservatism — the Trump apologia, the recent religious fad — is plain.

Of course, voters are free to leave these people to it and thank themselves for giving Labour power in 2024. But there’s the most enormous catch. Almost all the reforms that Britain needs to undertake at home are likeliest to come from a government of the right. Welfare costs are unsustainable. The state is putting new encumbrances on employers. The tax burden is heavy and projected to grow.

This is the predicament of modern Britain. The country needs centre-right reform at home and centre-left leadership abroad. That is, the people likeliest to trim an untenable welfare state are also the likeliest to look at US defence secretary Pete Hegseth and think, “Let us tie our national honour to this genius.” The people most willing to improve relations with the EU and China are also those most apt to stuff the trade unions’ mouths with gold.

If the British constitution detached foreign from domestic affairs, this problem might be at least theoretically get-aroundable with, say, a President Starmer and a Prime Minister Badenoch. Instead, all power is concentrated in one office. Short of gene-splicing a Keir Badenoch into existence, voters have no option but to decide which ordeal — big government, or geopolitical bondage to the most erratic of the world powers — is the least bad. 

Let me make the point in more concrete form. It is plausible, even probable, that Labour goes into the next election proposing a huge step towards the EU, such as membership of the customs union or of the single market. At once, and at last, there would be a tangible pro-growth idea to vote for. But another Labour term implies another round of public sector nest-feathering at the cost of higher taxes or more borrowing. On the balance of probabilities — there is no guarantee — a Badenoch or Farage government would be friendlier to business. But it would also continue Britain’s estrangement from an €18tn single market that is near enough to see from the Kent coast. Is there a net gain under either government?

Labour thinks it is prudent to remove a popular cap on child benefit at a time of high public debt. The opposition thinks it is sensible that Britain’s goods trade with the EU is more fettered than Turkey’s. You need not be a reflexive centrist, a “pox on both their houses” merchant, to see that Britain has no good electoral options here. Nor is there a third scenario in which the right softens on Europe over time or Labour starts to respect and incentivise private sector risk-taking. Living vicariously through America is central to British conservatism: almost the price of membership. Labour exists to steer public money to client voters, as some were willing to point out in the summer of 2024, when Starmer gulled the credulous into believing that he gave the least hoot about “growth”. These parties are just acting in accordance with their nature.

I can anticipate one objection to this argument. It was a Labour government that got Britain into the Iraq war, just as it was the (post-David Cameron) Tories who developed a taste for big government. These are cases of demented Atlanticism under the left and inefficiency under the right.

All of this is correct — in fact, Labour is likelier to reform pensions, as it relies less on the old vote — but also attributable to special circumstances. Tony Blair was sui generis. A garden-variety Labour leader would not have been so martial or so keen on backing America at almost literally all costs. As for the profligate Tories, there was a pandemic going on. In normal times, the right would not have bequeathed to Labour such a large state.

Because the parable of Nixon in China is so ingrained, people tend to believe that controversial but worthwhile ideas come from unlikely quarters. It isn’t true. Major reforms, such as the welfare state and the supply-side revolution, almost always emerge from exactly the party you’d expect. Britain needs two at the same time: a taming of the state at home and a strategic tilt from the US to its own continent. The best we can do is choose which absolute necessity to do without.

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