I'm an ex-Tory leader — Kemi Badenoch should bear this in mind about Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s win in the US election is a wake up call to the world. His campaign clearly resonated with the American people and is a warning to political parties that they must take voters’ concerns about immigration and the cost of living seriously.

Lord Michael Howard

Following the UK Conservatives’ disastrous electoral result earlier this year, we must learn from our sister party’s success over the pond. But let me be clear — Trump’s anti-climate action agenda is something we must not seek to copy.

Our party must avoid the same kind of climate scepticism espoused by Trump or we might as well prepare for 10 years of opposition now.

We are the party of the common ground. We are pragmatic. We are not the party of easy answers. Kemi Badenoch’s leadership is testimony to this.

Every poll in the UK is clear. People care about the environment. Voters across the political spectrum care about climate change. The UK is simply not as polarised on green issues as America: there are no votes to be had on this side of the Atlantic for opposing climate action.

While the economy and immigration will likely remain top concerns, many British voters see climate change as a key hygiene test for a party’s electoral credibility. Staunch opposition to climate action will end our hopes of winning back those pro-climate action voters who backed the Conservatives at successive elections since 2010 but who we lost in 2024.

This means we must not copy and paste Trump’s slogans like “drill, baby, drill”. Sensible extraction of our North Sea oil and gas resources — something the Labour Party is far too squeamish about — remains important, but they are running out.

Building more homegrown renewables and nuclear is how we will become more energy independent in the longer term. This is not to say that Trump’s opponents had the best solutions on the environment — far from it. While we must accept the need to act on climate change, we must challenge the left’s damaging approach to it.

We must not ape statist, high-spending policies like GB Energy and the Inflation Reduction Act. Neither Labour nor the Democrats hold the answer to doing climate action the right way. Too often, the need to take action has led us to accept policies that are not right for the wider economy and consumer choice.

That is why our party must set out our own free-market, low-cost path to tackling climate change. Getting it right is a precondition of our electoral revival, whilst climate scepticism will alienate the public.

Kemi Badenoch has promised to return the party to core conservative principles and I wholeheartedly agree. That should apply to the environment too.

We are conservatives after all - it is our duty to conserve. As Mrs Thatcher said, we don’t have “a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy.”

The same was true for Republican leaders of old. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt on the environment said, “I do not recognise the right to waste them [natural resources of our land], or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”

Conservatives in the UK, the USA, and across the world should heed his words.

First published by Express. Lord Howard is the former Leader of the Conservative Party.