Come in, Agent Badenoch – your cover as a secret asset for Labour is blown…

By publicly defending US vice president JD Vance – one of the most unpopular people in Britain – the Tory leader has been rumbled for low-level sabotage of her own party, says John Rentoul

The prime minister’s spin doctors had a problem on Tuesday. Their man had been made to look a fool by Donald Trump, who cut off military support for Ukraine just hours after Keir Starmer assured parliament that this was not the US position.

At the same time, JD Vance – President Trump’s Muttley – had gone on TV and insulted British troops by pouring scorn on Starmer’s idea of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine. He said he thought a minerals deal would be “a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.

As Britain and France were the only countries that had said they were willing to deploy troops to help secure a peace deal (Australia joined in a few hours later), this seemed a rather pointed comment.

Social media was ablaze with British indignation, but Starmer – living up to his nickname “Steer Calmer” – couldn’t comment, trying as he was to stay on good terms with the Trump administration.

What to do? At this point, it seems that someone in Labour’s media operation had the bright idea of mobilising Agent Badenoch.

She has been working under deep cover for some time now, engaged in low-level sabotage of Conservative efforts to recover from their election drubbing.

So far, her work has been well concealed, asking the same question more than once at Prime Minister’s Questions to give Starmer the chance of an easy putdown and generally making a mess of being leader of the opposition – nothing too obvious, but enough to allow Nigel Farage to credibly claim to be the real opposition to Labour.

Yesterday, though, her Labour handlers took a risk and sent her out to defend JD Vance.

“I know JD Vance quite well,” she said when asked about his words by a TV journalist who caught up with her at a farmers’ demo.

At this point, we can imagine the unease at Labour HQ, monitoring all media output everywhere. Is she going to overdo it? Was she going to defend one of the people most despised by British voters? The one who bullied Volodymyr Zelensky on the chief bully’s behalf? The man who went to Munich to criticise Britain’s record on free speech?

Yes, it turned out that she was.

“I’ve looked at the comments. I don’t think he actually said that, a lot of people are getting carried away. They are saying loads of things, and getting quite animated, let’s keep cool heads.”

A lot of people had indeed been getting quite animated, including James Cartlidge, Kemi Badenoch’s own shadow defence secretary, who had tweeted that Britain and France had come to the aid of the US, “deploying thousands of personnel to Afghanistan, including my own brother and numerous parliamentary colleagues, past and present. It’s deeply disrespectful to ignore such service and sacrifice.”

Vance himself later tried to say that he hadn’t mentioned Britain and France and it was “absurdly dishonest” to suggest that he meant them. He meant other unnamed countries volunteering support “privately”, which have “neither the battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful”.

Meanwhile, back at the farmers’ rally, Agent Badenoch seemed to sense that she had gone too far. The TV reporter asked: “Do you think he was talking about France, not Britain?”

Badenoch said: “I’m not getting into that speculation.” She hastened off to a meeting of her shadow cabinet, where she ordered a crackdown on Tory MPs taking to social media to air their thoughts “in real time” on Ukraine and US relations.

A message from Rebecca Harris, the Tory chief whip, to MPs said: “When it comes to defence and national security, we need to raise the threshold for what needs to be said publicly and ensure the facts are clear first.”

A special telling-off, adding to the impression of Tory indiscipline, was reserved for Alicia Kearns, the shadow foreign office minister, who had called for President Trump’s invitation to a state visit to be withdrawn.

It would not be at all surprising if, after that shadow cabinet meeting, Badenoch discovered several messages from her Labour handlers on her burner phone urging her to tone it down a bit.

No wonder that at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, she played it safe. She asked five consensual questions about Ukraine, thanked Starmer for his answers and expressed support for his approach. The messages must have got through.