Kemi Badenoch breaks her silence on Ukraine – finally

After a former Tory prime minister and the current Liberal Democrat leader made the running on the Trump-Zelenskyy war of words, Kemi Badenoch finally broke her silence.

Amid warnings of a Trump-Putin stitch-up that betrays President Zelenskyy, the Tory leader had been missing in action, even neglecting to mention Ukraine in a conference speech this week.

Now she has spoken out, finally. But in a contradictory statement, she said President Trump was wrong to claim that Zelenskyy is a dictator but right that Europe needs to pull its weight.

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Then she said that under successive prime ministers the Conservatives had, and always would, stand with Ukraine, whereas Starmer should boost defence spending and “show some leadership”.

Perhaps she was goaded into breaking her silence by the typically flamboyant words of one of those successive Tory prime ministers, Boris Johnson, and attacks by the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey.

Mr Johnson, a cheerleader for both President Zelenskyy and President Trump since he was PM, tried to have it both ways too, criticising the US president’s wild claims but backing his motives.

“Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action,” he said in a pithy statement on Trump buddy Elon Musk’s X.

But at least Mr Johnson came up with a sensible suggestion: unfreeze the hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets being blocked by Belgium, France and other counties.

Quite why Ms Badenoch urged Sir Keir Starmer to “get on a plane to Washington”, when the whole world knows he’s getting on a plane to Washington next week, is anybody’s guess.

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Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader and self-appointed chief Trump basher in UK politics, has accused both the Conservatives and Reform UK of being “Trump boot-lickers”.

Strong words, no doubt partly motivated by political point-scoring against political opponents. Yet he later said he hoped “the whole political spectrum in the UK would speak “with one voice”.

Good luck with that. To be fair to Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer, there has until now been a political consensus in the UK in support of President Zelenskyy and Ukraine.

But with Kemi Badenoch playing catch-up, criticising the PM’s leadership, and James Cleverly now claiming David Lammy’s “silence is deafening”, that consensus is in danger of fraying.