Is Kemi Badenoch plotting an American move?

Brits who make a pivot to America tend to fall into two categories. There are those who seek a bigger stage – like Alfred Hitchcock or Christopher Hitchens. Then there are those who were in some sense “run out of town” back in Britain and now seek solace and refuge in the New World. Under this heading we can put the Pilgrim Fathers, Thomas Paine, Mark Thatcher (wayward son of Margaret Thatcher), and now, Kemi Badenoch – beleaguered leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.

Badenoch has penned an odd op-ed for the New York Post celebrating the policies of the second Trump administration. The article begins with a strangely wry hat tip to the 47^th President on the “Not bad, kid” pattern:

“But often these days I look across the pond at the United States and think you guys might be on to something.”

Which is rather a lot like me informing Michael Phelps that he may be “on to something” with his butterfly stroke. The rest of the article carries on in a similar vein, praising action on the border, energy, and defense. 

Yet why did she write it? It is safe to say that the voters Mrs Badenoch so desperately needs (her Tories have now fallen to third place in the polls, displaced as the party of the right by Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK) are unlikely to be regular readers of the Post. 

Cockburn can think of some slightly lower motives. Could the article be an attempt to set the seemingly doomed party leader up for a career on the American lecture circuit? Bolshy conservative British firebrands are always in demand stateside, as the post-premiership of Liz Truss shows. In that case, we would refer Mrs Badenoch to the words of the English poet W.H. Auden, himself a plyer of this trade:

“Another morning comes: I see,

Dwindling below me on the plane,

The roofs of one more audience

I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although

I don’t remember which was which:

God bless the USA, so large,

So friendly, and so rich.”