Kemi Badenoch is being outstripped by her political opponents

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch’s first major foreign policy speech showed she is still in her safe space. The trouble is that politics is moving at warp speed.

Badenoch has commissioned a series of Tory policy reviews to be ready in advance of the next general election in 2029, satisfied she has time to apply her engineer’s brain to the problems in a logical, methodical way. But she is being overtaken.

On Tuesday, Badenoch delivered a keynote foreign affairs speech that was long on philosophy and short on policy. She said defence spending should rise but declined to set a new target, only arguing that it must rise above a target of 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 and that the foreign aid and welfare budgets should be slashed to help pay for it.

Badenoch is also still struggling to shrug off the record of the last Tory administration, which saw the number of army troops fall below 73,000 for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars.

And as if to underline the point about the frustrations of Opposition, only two hours after her speech, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was on his feet in an unexpected House of Commons statement making exactly this point.

He announced the “biggest sustained investment in defence since the end of the Cold War”, taking spending to three per cent after 2030 by slashing aid. Badenoch is being outstripped by her political opponents.

Both Badenoch and Starmer were speaking as YouGov released another poll that put Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the lead. Reform, with its online presence and big Friday night rallies, is making the weather.

Starmer said in the Commons that he is not pleased about cutting the foreign aid budget. But slashing it to pay for weapons has parked his as-yet-unbuilt tanks on the lawn of both Reform UK and Badenoch’s Tories. His decision is likely to poll very well, even if it will be unpopular in some Labour circles.

In Reform’s 2024 “contract” with voters ahead of the election, Farage said his party would increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent by 2027 and then three per cent by 2030. Starmer’s plan takes UK spending to three per cent by the “end of the next Parliament” or 2035.

And in Starmer’s statement to MPs, there was a note of political philosophy too.

“We must reject any false choice between our allies, between one side of the Atlantic or the other. That is against our history – country and party – because it is against our fundamental national interest. It has survived countless external challenges in the past. We’ve fought wars together; we’re the closest partners in trade, growth and security. So this week when I meet President Trump I will be clear. I want this relationship to go from strength to strength,” he said.

Starmer has undoubtedly put himself in a stronger position for when he meets Trump in Washington on Thursday, after the President called on Nato allies to spend five per cent of GDP on defence. Nato Chief Mark Rutte says the figure should be north of three per cent.

The transatlantic alliance on the war in Ukraine has been put under severe strain by Trump’s approach to ending the conflict. He has opened talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, branded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator”, suggested Kyiv’s forces were to blame for the war and voted alongside Russia, North Korea and Iran at the UN against a resolution condemning Russian aggression.

Back in London, and safe in the knowledge it was a hypothetical question, Badenoch said she “wouldn’t be afraid to” say that Putin is a dictator to Trump’s face if she were the one visiting Washington this week. This bravado would be slightly more convincing if she had allowed journalists from less friendly news outlets to ask her questions after her speech.

Badenoch also used her address at the Policy Exchange think-tank to signal that the UK should be willing to consider quitting the European Convention on Human Rights, not advancing her position on what she said during the Tory leadership campaign. That disappointed the hardcore Eurosceptics in the audience who’d hoped for more. She also stopped short of announcing a target for cutting Britain’s World Health Organisation contributions.

But if you came for philosophy, you were in the right place. With threats growing at home and abroad, too much focus, she argued, has been placed on values at the expense of interests. Instead, Badenoch suggested “conservative realism” was needed, by which she means a hard-headed, sometimes protectionist approach to foreign relations.

Watching her was the historian Niall Ferguson, who has also worked on Republican presidential campaigns. His warning about countries spending “more on debt interest than it does on defence” was quoted by Badenoch.

“I have spoken before about my core belief that we must fight for the Western values of liberalism; those enlightenment values need to be fought for,” she concluded.

The Shadow Cabinet, out en masse, applauded politely. Publicly at least they seem satisfied to stick with her steady-as-she-goes strategy. But that’s not universally true of the wider Parliamentary Tory party; some MPs are starting to express frustration at how long she is taking to make a dent in the opinion polls.

The UK, she warned, faces a “bitter reckoning” unless it wakes up to the fact that “it is no longer 1995”.

Time is speeding up. Starmer’s decision on defence spending proves the point. Never mind 1995 – with Trump in the White House, it hardly feels like 2025 anymore.