Next year, we know for sure, there will be an election. And the vote could change everything. It might, indeed, be one of the most significant events in Britain’s postwar history. It might be remembered for decades, maybe even centuries, as a landmark political event, with people talking about the gulf separating the years before it and the years after it. For in 2024 the voters of the United States of America will go to the polls.
I am not suggesting that the British election, which we also expect in 2024, will be insignificant. It is likely to produce a change of government and that is always consequential. It could produce a landslide, leaving its political mark for many years. Nonetheless, it is the American election that has the greater capacity to tear our ship of state from its moorings.
This is not because a change of British prime ministers would make little difference but because a change of American presidents might make such a great one.
In the past hundred years there have been only two occasions when the closing stages of American and British election campaigns have coincided. And in neither case did they impact greatly upon each other.
Foreign alliances figured strongly in the 1924 British election campaign between Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald and the Tories under Stanley Baldwin. But the simultaneous election effort of President Calvin Coolidge does not appear to have come up.
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In the run-up to the 1964 election, Harold Wilson consciously tried to capture some of the excitement of American campaigns and suggest that he could bring the modernity of the late President John F Kennedy into Downing Street. But President Lyndon Johnson’s procession to overwhelming victory in the US did not cross over with the British campaign in any significant way.
I think 2024 will be different. If Rishi Sunak holds an election in October or November (and despite my own arguments for May, I expect an autumn poll date) then the final few weeks before voting here will also feature what will be a very turbulent American election campaign. Every day, news of our own politics will be accompanied by the raucous noise of US debate. And in particular by the raucous noise of Donald Trump.
Despite it being a reasonable prediction that criminal proceedings and his manifest unfitness for office might hobble Trump’s candidacy, neither appears to have done so. He seems overwhelmingly likely to be the Republican candidate and, as such, stands a very good chance of returning to the White House.
If he did so, the impact on this country would be profound. Two linked features of Trump’s politics have become far more marked in the years since he left office and he can be expected to pursue them with much greater vigour. The first is his open attempt to subvert democracy and his use of the language of dictators and tyrants. He has talked of how, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution”.
The other feature is that his previous isolationism has become a more open sympathy for other leaders — dictators or near-dictators — who think they embody justice and retribution.
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The prospect, if Trump were to succeed, is therefore of an America moving away from democratic norms itself and abandoning international support for democratic norms. Ukraine is the place where this might be expected to start.
It is hard to overstate the importance to Britain of such a change. From the moment the US entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, Britain’s security and its foreign policy have been inextricably linked with that of America. The link is so strong that it is hard for us to act independently and only just about possible (as Wilson showed during Vietnam) for us to stand clear of US actions.
So many of our arguments about world affairs, so much funding and so many institutions, including nuclear defence, rest on the assumption that the US is fundamentally a good actor that opposes bad actors. This assumption will struggle to survive a second Trump presidency.
And beyond that, since the Second World War American capitalism and arguments about it have been heavily influential. On the right, the ideas of small-state conservatism and tax-cutting have been shared across the Atlantic. But on the left too, from Tony Crosland in the 1950s onwards, the American liberal idea of meritocracy without class barriers has gradually replaced socialism.
So if American democracy appears to be failing and that country is visibly pulling itself apart, it will be important to politicians of all kinds.
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As we are some months away from an election these points do not appear much in political debates in Britain. But soon they surely will. And isn’t there at least a good chance they will become quite a large feature of the forthcoming campaign? On the right, a surging Trump campaign will give succour to the Faragists. Every day there will be a new outrageous comment from the Republican nominee and there will be constant pressure on the Conservative leadership to distance themselves from it. Some candidates will endorse Trump, others will attack him. Some will urge his populist themes upon Sunak, while others will insist they are rejected. The Tories will be pulled in several directions.
The challenge for Labour will be different. Trump will be a target and any Tory division an asset. But the prospect of a Trump presidency would nonetheless be testing. It would prompt a debate about security policy and the Atlantic alliance which I am sure Sir Keir Starmer would rather not have. And it would pose a difficult problem for the incoming prime minister, of any party.
What are we going to do about Nato if Trump doesn’t want it? About the Ukraine war if Trump won’t support President Zelensky? About nuclear weapons if the American president can’t be trusted with them? About defence spending if the US won’t subsidise it? About leadership of the western alliance if the US can no longer be trusted with it?
Right now these are unlikely to be election issues. By the time we get to next autumn, I think they might be.
