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These weren’t exactly the words Kemi Badenoch had been hoping to hear. Halfway through her interview on the Today programme on Tuesday morning, the BBC presenter Nick Robinson observed that, in regard to the US coup in Venezuela, the Conservative leader’s position wasn’t that far off from Keir Starmer’s. You could sense the air go out of the room. In KemiWorld there is no greater dishonour than a likeness to the prime minister. Time for the fightback to begin. To create some distance.
OK, Kemi said. Yes, she too drew the line at Greenland. That would be a step too far. There was no need for Donald Trump to claim the country for America. That was an action that could threaten Nato. And besides, as far as she knew, Greenland wasn’t a rogue narco state. She, too believed in a world of moral relativism. One where it was fine to invade countries whose regimes we disliked. There was one rule for the west and another for the rest.
But as for Venezuela, she was all for the kidnap and imprisonment of Nicolás Maduro. Her only regret was that the UK hadn’t thought of doing it long ago. No one was mourning the demise of the dictator. Here was the thing. International law and the old rules-based order were just so last century. Margaret Thatcher might have voiced her disapproval of the American invasion of Grenada in 1983, but were she alive today she would be all for the latest action in Venezuela.
And just think of all the trouble Tony Blair had got himself in by inventing weapons of mass destruction. Just so that he could have a legal pretext for invading Iraq. These days, he would just have said: “C’mon guys. Let’s just get rid of Saddam Hussein and get our mitts on the oil.” And the rest of the world would have been grateful. Because that war worked out so well.
More than anything, the American operation in Venezuela had been the morally right thing to do. Kemi wasn’t too sure of the legal pretext, but there again she wasn’t much bothered. We now lived in a world where the strong and the powerful got to call all the shots. So why bother getting bogged down in all the legal niceties? Let’s just get stuck in. Instead of all this liberal hand-wringing about process, we should be lining up the next regimes we don’t like to depose them. Cut the time-wasting.
That was the real difference between her and Starmer, Kemi said. Deep down, Keir was still a lawyer. Though he understood the rules-based order was all but dead and buried and that the US could get away with almost anything, he still mourned their loss. He thought the world had become a more dangerous, more anarchic place. One where the weak got crushed. But not Kemi. She was thrilled to see the back of international law. May the best country win. Or failing that, the strongest. Just leave Greenland alone. Greenland was different.
“I don’t agree with a foreign policy of meetings and saying nice things to one another,” said Kemi. At which point, Nick Robinson almost fell off his chair before he remembered she had no chance of becoming the next prime minister. Just as well. Because it seems that Badenoch’s approach in international diplomacy is to go to war first and to ask questions afterwards. She doesn’t seem to realise that maintaining peace often also involves sitting around a table and trying to find common ground. I guess if she can’t help picking a fight with her friends, why should we expect her to be any different with her enemies?
By now, Kemi was warming to her favourite subject. Why Starmer was so rubbish. If she had been prime minister, she would have been invited into The Donald’s war room, she suggested. Trump wouldn’t have dared make a move on Maduro without her say so. At some level, she genuinely believes this stuff. There again, she does have a problem with reality.
This was too much for Robinson. He pointed out that no world leaders had been given the heads up by Trump and that in any case Starmer had not been wholly ineffectual. Like Kemi, he had decided to give The Donald a free pass on Venezuela because the coalition of the willing needed US support on any peace agreement to end the war in Ukraine. So a degree of sycophancy was canny realpolitik. And in any case, Starmer had also negotiated tariff reductions. So not entirely useless.
Kemi wouldn’t hear a word of this. She would have done much better than this. She couldn’t say quite how but we were expected to take her word on this. Right, said Robinson. So how many meetings have you had with Trump? “Er, none,” came the reply. Though she had spoken to him for 30 seconds at the state banquet and in that time he had apparently made it clear he thought she had a bright future. But hey, she had met Giorgia Meloni. Would that do? Nick tried to explain that it hadn’t been the Italian prime minister who had attacked Venezuela.
The interview then switched to Brexit. How did Kemi think it was going? Apart from the fact that it was all going terribly and the UK was getting it all wrong, she would give it 10 out of 10. Because we had made it happen. That was all that really counted. People shouldn’t get too hung up about being much worse off than 10 years ago because that was a category error. The important thing was that it had been an exercise in sovereignty.
Er, hello. She had spent the first 10 minutes of the interview saying that might was right and that other countries sovereignty was now up for grabs. And now she was claiming UK sovereignty as an inalienable right. It’s almost as if there is a missing connection in her synapse. That each sentence is subject to a memory wipe the moment she has moved on to the next one.
We ended with Kemi insisting she had been a net zero sceptic for longer than Nigel Farage. Which was an out-and-out lie. Maybe Badenoch just wanted to start the year as she intended to go on. Constantly reshaping the truth to what she would like it to be. Which reminded her. Perhaps today would be the day that The Donald phoned her. She had given him her number at Windsor. And it was odd the president found the time to talk to any reporter in Washington and not her. After all, they had a possible invasion of Greenland to discuss.
