Liz Truss gets close, but not too close, to endorsing Trump

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. The Conservative party is embroiled in a row over Islamophobia after a weekend in which Lee Anderson said that Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, was in the control of Islamists, adding for good measure that Khan had “given our capital city away to his mates”. After refusing to apologise, Anderson lost the whip on Saturday. Yesterday, deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden was unable to give a straight answer when asked by Sky’s Trevor Phillips if it was racist or by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg if it was Islamophobic. Sayeeda Warsi, David Cameron’s former Tory party co-chair and the first Muslim woman to serve in cabinet, has warned that the Conservatives are heading into “the gutter” on the issue.

Kemi Badenoch then began a war of words on X, this time with her opposite number, the shadow equalities minister Anneliese Dodds, over the use of the definition “Islamophobia” instead of the Tories’ adopted term “anti-Muslim hatred”. It is a fascinating theological debate in many contexts. But ultimately both definitions of “anti-Muslim hatred” and Islamophobia cover saying that “Sadiq Khan had given London away to his Islamist mates”.

This morning, Rishi Sunak said that Anderson’s remarks “weren’t acceptable” and “were wrong”. But his belated entry into the story is typical of how the prime minister leads on almost every policy area and issue – even his pet projects such as making maths compulsory until the age of 18 badly lack prime ministerial involvement at a departmental level.

I don’t, in truth, have a lot of additional analysis to add here: the politics of this are bad normatively, morally, and also strategically. I do, however, have some thoughts on Liz Truss’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and what we can say about when Rishi Sunak should hold the next election.

That’s deep, man

When we were devising names for newsletters, I came up with very few that were any good, but many of my colleagues did. But now Liz Truss has come in with an eleventh-hour suggestion, after she dubbed the FT part of the “deep state” in her appearance at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in the US. (“Deep state with Stephen Bush” has a rather nice ring to it, I think, but fortunately for all involved I don’t get the final say on these things.)

More importantly, politically speaking, she also used the conference to reiterate an argument she has made before: that the world needs “a Republican” back in the White House. This is a striking phrase, of course, because “a Republican” is a way of not saying Donald Trump despite the fact that we all know, as Ed Luce writes in his latest piece on why Nikki Haley is still running for the GOP nomination, that the only prospect that it will not be Trump is if some kind of “black swan event” forces the former president to drop out of the contest.

There are lots of reasons why Truss might not want to explicitly endorse Trump: the first being that she knows full well it is hard, frankly, to reconcile her hawkish positions on foreign policy more broadly and her support for Ukraine in particular with anything Trump has said on that issue. But nonetheless, for Truss, she has to at least make noises that sound a bit pro-Trump.

Other Conservative MPs will go still further and not bother using the phrase “a Republican”. They will instead just say that their preference is for Donald Trump to beat Joe Biden. Trump is titanically unpopular in the UK and this isn’t going to change. It only matters at the margins, but the last thing the Conservative general election campaign needs is anything that makes the Tory party look a bit odd and a bit detached from the average Briton. So for that reason, holding the vote in May looks to me like a better political call than waiting until November or even later. But it is still highly likely that the election won’t be until the month of the US presidential election at the earliest.

Now try this

I had a terrific time at the Barbican Centre this weekend, listening to the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s latest in their “Total Immersion” series, this time focused on the modern American composer Missy Mazzoli. You can listen to most of it this coming Wednesday at 19.30 GMT on Radio 3, and to her 2012 opera Song from the Uproar on Radio 3 at 22.00 GMT Saturday.

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