Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
A year ago many prominent figures on the British right were vocal fans of Donald Trump, praising his plans to cut waste and tackle illegal migration.
Following the Iran war, however, some of the US president’s most ardent cheerleaders in the UK have pivoted away from him.
On Friday Nigel Farage sought to minimise his personal relationship with Trump. “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by,” said the Reform UK leader.
Farage told the FT the bilateral partnership was “our most important relationship in the world . . . whether it’s [Joe] Biden in the White House or Trump.” Last year he said he hoped to become prime minister “quickly while Donald Trump is still in office.”
Lord David Frost, the UK’s former Brexit negotiator, made an even more dramatic shift this week.
The Conservative peer, who once welcomed Trump’s re-election as the “first great victory” of national conservatism, admitted that he had harboured high hopes for the president’s political and economic strategy.
Yet Trump has shown himself “heedless” of the moral element of leadership and “undeserving of support”, Frost said in an article for The Daily Telegraph. “A moral line has to be drawn somewhere and this week Trump went beyond it.”
Others to distance themselves from Trump include the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who in recent weeks has hit out at Trump’s “childish” repeated criticisms of Sir Keir Starmer.
In February last year she hailed Trump’s return to the Oval Office as “showing that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems, but it’s the second time around when you really know how to fix them.”
Brexiters’ support for Trump has swayed between an ideological enthusiasm and a more pragmatic argument, that Britain cannot afford to diverge from its most powerful ally.
But it has weakened over the past year, as the US president has imposed tariffs on the UK, equivocated over Ukraine, mocked British forces’ sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threatened to wipe out Iran’s entire civilisation.
Just 18 per cent of Leave voters say that Trump has done a good job in handling the Iran war, according to Ipsos polling.
In January, Frost argued that Britain “should strive to be America’s new Israel”. This week he said that Trump’s actions had made the EU seem to many to be “the only refuge from a wayward ally”.
Farage said that he was “quite shocked” by Trump’s threat to wipe out Iranian civilisation and condemned the president’s remarks as “way too far” and “over the top in every single way.”
Reform officials are now at pains to point out that Farage’s renunciation of Trump’s remarks this week was not the first time he has taken a circumspect view of the president’s approach.
Last year Farage labelled the US leader’s announcement of global tariffs “excessive” and also said he “would not be 100 per cent with” the US administration in its approach to Ukraine peace talks, warning that “Russia is getting far too much” under proposals backed by Washington in March 2025.
However, Reform had also signalled its admiration for the US president by repurposing his Maga slogan for a UK audience with calls to “Make Britain Great Again”.
The shift on the right comes as Starmer has also shown an increasing willingness not only to diverge from Trump but to criticise him outright. This week the UK prime minister said he was “fed up” with household and business energy bills rising due to the actions of the US president.
Former prime minister Boris Johnson, meanwhile, called the Iran war “dumb” and said that the US had “clearly made a mistake.”
Johnson, who in 2024 said a second Trump term could be “just what the world needs”, told the Link Media Festival in Trieste, Italy, on Saturday: “We don’t know what the objectives are and what the strategy is.”
He tried to switch the blame to European countries, for failing to engage sufficiently with Trump. But asked if he thought about calling Trump on the phone, he said: “I do it the whole time. It’s very depressing, because sometimes I think he listens, sometimes obviously he doesn’t.”
Not all Brexiters have openly criticised Trump. Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Conservative Party minister, said: “It’s just possible, and I may be catastrophically wrong . . . that [Trump] may have succeeded more than we realise” in Iran. That view is echoed by other presenters on right-wing channel GB News.
Yet in the UK as in the US, opinion may have shifted among a younger cadre of “alt-right” influencers.
Libertarian British-Russian podcaster Konstantin Kisin had said in 2024 that he thought Trump would do “a better job” in the Middle East than Biden. After the US-Israeli attack on Iran led to the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, he concluded: “For all our desire for there to be a plan, all the signs are there was no plan.”
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Bratton