The article examines the challenges facing Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch in light of Donald Trump's presidency. While Starmer must navigate his relationship with an unreliable US ally, Badenoch, as leader of the Conservative Party, faces a more fundamental question: will she uphold the boundaries of mainstream conservatism or allow it to be eroded by the rise of racially aggravated nationalism?
By jumping on Elon Musk’s passing bandwagon and echoing the far right, the Conservative leader has shown she doesn’t understand her responsibilities
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.
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 “on Monday could tell he was venting genuine and justified anger at a dangerous and cynical campaign of misinformation.
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.
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