This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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British and American politics have very little in common. Why anyone should think that they ought to is a mystery. It’s quaint on their side, when it happens, but pitifully monotonous on our part.

Our general elections coincided this year and owed nothing to each other. Their conservative leader’s popular success offered no inspiration to the Tories, as all their recent leadership candidates were keen to insist. But forced similarity is an unnecessary requirement for considering what leadership means as this is a universal virtue. And the unrelated English-speaking countries have a huge problem.

Writing online for The Critic, our contributor Lucy Sixsmith noted of Justin Welby’s first resisted, then conceded, resignation that what he especially seemed to want to avoid was humiliation. This was the very human failing of needing to be in authority over others — to lead rather than to serve. If the Archbishop of Canterbury can’t set a moral example, no one has reasonable grounds for being optimistic about politicians doing so.

A Tory leadership contest happened at all because of the following chain of events. One leader — Boris Johnson — dissolved in a welter of sleaze and inadequacy, to be followed by another who ought to have been too demonstrably incapable to receive the affirmative action promotions from which she had until then serially benefited.

This resulted in the leadership of Rishi Sunak, whose political incapacity peaked in the most successful political party in history suffering its worst-ever defeat. The consequence is Kemi Badenoch. Where to start?

First off, politics is not a morality story. Nor is it mechanistically meritocratic. Keir Starmer is a Westminster-model parliamentary figure cut from the same cloth as Michael Ignatieff, parachuted in as Canadian opposition leader after years living abroad, and Malcolm Turnbull, who was vastly successful in private practice as a lawyer and only became an Australian MP late into his career.

Ignatieff failed to become prime minister, whilst Turnbull — after ousting his much worthier predecessor Tony Abbott — barely scraped back into office and was himself removed by a “party spill” before the next federal election.

Starmer, like Ignatieff and Turnbull, had a grown-up career before entering parliament. Like them, his unsure touch once in parliament was obvious from the first: his strategic failings as shadow Brexit Secretary harmed Labour in the run-up to the 2019 general election. Since becoming prime minister, his pinched, liberal progressive lawyer’s vision has won few converts and disillusioned many who gave Labour its chance to govern.

Yet he did become PM and with an impregnable majority to do what he wants. In case the lesson needs repeating: as with life, politics is not fair.

If British conservatives do look at America, what do they see? For those with long memories, it is not what they were urged to notice 30 years ago. For back then, moral judgement could be applied to leadership.

Whether it was in the pages of The Sunday Telegraph, thanks to the industry of their then US correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, or through airmailed copies of R. Emmett Tyrrell’s American Spectator, it was plain that America was led by a monster.

The court of the Clintons was awash, by this telling, with murders disguised as suicides, incontinent sexual assaults and bizarrely successful real estate dealings.

The reason to recall this ancient transatlantic history is not just to enjoy the snark: “Bill’s sins are measured by how big a Bible he carries into church” and, in the run up to the 1996 presidential election, “How do you know Clinton thinks he’s going to be elected again? … He’s started dating again.”

It is also to remember what American conservatives did in opposition to this travesty, which was to present a moral contrast. What Clinton did was wrong, was the late century pitch. He was a bad man. There could be better men (and women), who’d do the right things. Where American conservatives are now is Donald Trump.

How US conservatives reconcile what was horribly wrong with Clinton with what is terribly right with Trump is their problem. It is so, precisely because it’s their problems they’re trying to deal with, and with rather greater electoral success than British conservatives have managed.

As he wrote in this publication, The American Conservative’s Jude Russo noted that Trump is hardly the demonic figure people at home or abroad pretend or actually believe him to be.

What Badenoch did with her authority was anything but conservative

But he is undoubtedly a #winner. Which brings us back again to Kemi Badenoch who, if Trump knew who she was, he might likely call a #whiner.

Badenoch’s critics who castigated her for laziness and nastiness before she won missed the essential truth that these are not vices in a Tory leader. The former could easily be simply the proper perspective with which to observe passing events — a languid ability to put things in their proper historical context. Whilst the latter could certainly be the correct tone for the situation we’re in.

Politicians absolutely deserve that. Badenoch’s problem is who she is.

For her aged white male admirers lacking peerages but writing in right-wing newspapers, she’s a proud black woman who, unburdened by Establishment niceties, won’t be afraid to tell truth to power. But no Tory can seriously expect conservatism out of Kemi Badenoch. She had her chance when she was in office.

What she did with her authority was anything but conservative. She was the minister of the 2022 command paper “Inclusive Britain: An Action Plan”, lauded by posturing “anti-woke” midwits at the time for its vibes, but which in fact mandated DEI for the NHS, including “year-on-year improvement in race and equality representation leading to parity” quotas amongst its many other delights.

As James McSweeney noted for The Critic online, she’s the minister who in 2023 indolently passed into British law disastrous EU rulings on “indirect discrimination”.

She lobbied for increased immigration; and ran away from leadership debates. During the general election she, to the point of simpleness, fumbled the easy skewering of trans activism at which Trump so excelled. She gave millions in taxpayers’ money to the activist Race Equality Foundation. She boasted about how “amazing” the prospect of her, “a Nigerian”, being in parliament would be (unlike, to do her full justice, the “fat” Jamaican she simultaneously damned Diane Abbott as being). Her much-touted equality guidance on trans matters in December 2023 was a miserable evasion, providing, as it did, for the legitimacy of “social transition” for children. We could go on … how we could go on.

This country is in the political mess it is in because Rishi Sunak, in the unimprovable words of Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “ragequit” as PM, calling a needlessly early general election and conducting the campaign with as much adeptness as he had governed.

Neither his colleagues nor, more troublingly, the system should have allowed him to abdicate responsibility and damn his party the way he did simply because he was emotionally incapable of dealing with petty frustrations. But they and it did, Badenoch centrally so.

When Badenoch has been trivially criticised before, such as by the loudmouth trans activist actor David Tennant, her petulant response has been telling and is worth quoting: “A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government.”

Badenoch, simply put, is an identitarian. She’s praised by her cheerleaders for the mere fact of her skin colour, and she repeatedly finds this worthy of commendation herself. Whatever this is, it’s not conservatism.

One of the most objectionable operators ever to be a member of the parliamentary lobby, Tom Baldwin, found himself on television with Badenoch earlier this year and merely lifted his finger to make a point. “Please don’t point at me like that. It’s unnecessarily aggressive,” the champion of robustness whined. This is the level to which British conservatism has descended. We most certainly should point at it.