The UK has a history of coddling authoritarian leaders – now it's happening again

The Guardian

28-02-2025

Why is Westminster, supposedly one of the world's great centres of democratic moderation, so welcoming to far-right foreign governments? For more than a century, since the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, authoritarians have often found allies, apologists or a deliberate absence of criticism in the Commons, despite our parliament's self-image as a historic enemy of fascism.
One reason for this forgiving attitude is that foreign policy is a pragmatic business, and Britain has increasingly become a country that can't afford to make enemies. The Starmer government's determination to see no evil in the Trump administration can be partly explained in those terms.
Yet other, darker and less-examined impulses have also shaped the behaviour of some of our MPs, ministers and political journalists towards rightwing autocrats – both those who have wielded absolute power and those who apparently would like to, such as Trump. These impulses reveal much about British politics and the frustrations, fears and fantasies of some of its practitioners and observers.
To some jaded or impatient players of the Westminster game, the regimes of foreign strongmen – so far, female authoritarians have been far less common – are objects of fascination. They represent politics pursued by alluringly different means.
At times such as now, when many voters are disillusioned with liberal democracy and its compromises, abandoned commitments and slow pace, autocrats can appear to be politicians who actually get things done. 'People ask me what difference new leadership will make,' said Kemi Badenoch last week. 'Well, take a look at President Trump.'
Admiration for his new administration is not confined to the Tories. Last month, Anna McShane of the New Britain Project, a thinktank which describes itself as 'progressive', wrote on the pro-Labour website LabourList: 'Starmer must learn from Trump: act fast, prioritise visible change … While his policies remain polarising, the effectiveness of this approach cannot be ignored.'
For some on the British right, foreign autocrats also appeal if they appear to be leading a crusade against one of conservatism's global enemies. In 1927, Winston Churchill, then a Tory chancellor, met Mussolini in Rome, five years after the dictator had seized power and begun violently suppressing the left. At a press conference after the meeting, Churchill said: 'If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you … in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.' In the 1970s and 1980s, many Tories and British rightwing journalists similarly supported Augusto Pinochet's brutal military regime in Chile, as an anti-communist ally in the cold war.
Nowadays, the British right's bogeyman is the supposed threat to western values from Islam and immigration. The ultra-aggressive approach of Trump to both, with his contempt for the law and the whole concept of multiculturalism, offers political cover and encouragement to Badenoch and Nigel Farage, as they take up ever-more illiberal positions. Trump's transgressive, seemingly all-powerful populism is the kind of politics they might dream of practising, were either of them to occupy Downing Street.
His presidency also thrills the Tory press. 'Trump has an extraordinary knack for tapping into the frustrations of … the respectable working class – the quiet, skilled or semi-skilled man paying for the food on the family table,' wrote John MacLeod in the Daily Mail last year. That Trump, with his vast inherited wealth and endless personal scandals, can appeal to millions of voters with utterly different backgrounds and values is a conservative fantasy come true. Since the dawn of mass democracy, the right has been trying to make its elites politically palatable.
In Britain a century ago, Mussolini also 'attracted the admiring attention of leading Conservative journals … as well as several newspapers, notably the Daily Mail,' wrote the historian of fascism Martin Pugh in his 2005 book Hurrah for the Blackshirts! As the paper's pro-fascist then owner, Lord Rothermere, put it: 'In my judgment, he [Mussolini] saved the whole western world.'
Apparently successful autocrats reassure rightwing journalists and politicians that history can be shaped by individuals, as conservatives have always wanted. An autocrat's cult of personality also provides the media with constant stories and opportunities for character studies. Among the Italian dictator's British admirers, wrote Pugh, 'those who met him invariably depicted Mussolini as simple, charming, businesslike, not the bombastic and theatrical figure portrayed in leftwing demonology.'
In January, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, described the new US president in a strikingly similar way. 'The Donald Trump I met,' he told the BBC, 'was a man who had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the UK, our royal family, Scotland …' Gone are the days when Lammy, as a less guarded Labour MP, called Trump a 'tyrant in a toupee'.
One problem with Westminster's warmth towards autocrats, whether diplomatic or genuinely enthusiastic, is that it eases their way by making them seem more respectable – rather than influencing them to moderate their behaviour, as is often claimed. All the British deference towards Mussolini in the 1920s and early 1930s did not stop him from eventually forming a hostile alliance with Adolf Hitler. Similarly, the refusal of Labour and the Tories to label Trump an extremist who is subverting the US constitution enables the BBC and other mainstream media organisations to avoid calling him an extremist, too. Meanwhile, his escalating transgressions continue.
Sooner or later, the far-right tide will recede in the US and elsewhere. Authoritarian populists are often poor at governing, as Trump showed in his first term. This time, his approval ratings – already very low for a new president by historic standards – have started to fall, as the drawbacks or impracticality of many of his policies have become clear to more people.
When the authoritarians do lose power, their acceptance or encouragement by so many British journalists and politicians may be widely seen as a huge moral and strategic misjudgment, as it was after Italian and German fascism had been defeated in the second world war. But Westminster will probably quickly move on. We are a moderate country, after all.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist