Last March, James Cleverly returned to the town in Sierra Leone where his late mother, Evelyn, was born. Having visited the country as a child, he was coming back as foreign secretary to launch his gender equality strategy in a place that clearly meant something to him. “I think of her all the time in the work we do,” he said.
Nine months later, Cleverly returned to Africa for very different reasons. Now home secretary, he was promoting plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, plans he is said to have described privately as “batshit”. A few weeks after that, the man who once professed himself “absolutely” a feminist would find himself apologising for joking at a Downing Street party that “a little bit of [the “date rape” drug] Rohypnol in her drink every night” was “not really illegal if it’s only a little bit”.
Britain’s current home secretary can be difficult to pigeonhole. He is the product of private schooling, the army reserve (in which he has served for decades) and Brexit-era politics, but also of childhood hardship and a mission to make his party more inclusive in which he still passionately believes. This is why – despite the enthusiasm in some quarters for Kemi Badenoch – his name is increasingly mentioned by moderate Tories seeking someone to back in the next leadership contest.
Civil servants rate his willingness to listen; at the Home Office, he is rebuilding fences trampled by his sacked predecessor, Suella Braverman. “He’s never going to be an angry politician. He’s got the brief he’s got, but that, I think, is the big change,” says Sunder Katwala, the director of the identity and immigration thinktank British Future.
Rugby-loving, sociable and relaxed – sometimes to a fault (he once said: “I talk too much and sometimes I speak a bit too frankly, which I think people like until they don’t like it”) – Cleverly is unusually well liked at Westminster. “He’s not out for his own ends and his rise wasn’t due to any unfair clambering over the top of other people. He was there at the right time in the right place, being a safe pair of hands,” says a former colleague, who attributes Cleverly’s survival under four Tory prime ministers to his old-fashioned approach of reliably executing the brief. He has made remarkably few enemies and caused no great disasters.
But there have been no great triumphs, either. Although he is thoughtful on some complex topics, from terrorism to Black Lives Matter, he has yet to reveal a wider political vision or the strategic ruthlessness to defeat highly organised rivals. One ex-minister who praises him as “moderate and sensible” says: “Whether he would be eaten alive in a leadership contest by people who would be seen as more aggressive and challenging, I can’t say.” Another describes him as “everyone’s second preference” – the candidate no one hates, but who has yet to cultivate a following of ardent true believers.
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Cleverly was born in 1969 in Lewisham hospital, where his mother was a midwife. She had immigrated to Britain to work for the NHS in 1960, following her sister. The women then met and married brothers from Wiltshire. Cleverly grew up in south London in the 1970s and has recalled National Front marches in nearby streets, as well as kids teasing him for being mixed race. (When the Duchess of Sussex gave birth in 2019, he tweeted that the welcome afforded a mixed-race royal baby made him feel “a bit emotional”.)
Whereas Braverman provoked and polarised with her attacks on multiculturalism, Cleverly’s instincts are to unify. “If we turn on ourselves, seek scapegoats, go into hiding or lash out it will only amplify what is already a sad and terrible thing,” he wrote on his blog in 2013, when the soldier Lee Rigby was murdered by terrorists not far from Cleverly’s family home. “But if we refuse to cast blame on an entire religion, make a point of standing shoulder to shoulder with our neighbours and continue to wear our military uniforms with pride, we shall have denied these thugs what they crave.”
Yet Cleverly is also the kind of Tory that most confounds the left: one whose own experience of childhood hardship seems to harden their belief in fiscal austerity. He once defended the two-child benefit cap on the grounds that his parents couldn’t afford two sets of private education and so decided he would be an only child; even then, the family shared a one-bed flat to afford the school fees (for Riverston first, then Colfe’s, both in south London). “To my mother, education is taken incredibly seriously,” he has said. “They lived on a fold-out bed in the living room [to do it] … So when the left [talk about hardship], I’m sitting there very quietly, saying to myself: ‘Fuck off – you have no idea what you’re talking about.’’’
The young Cleverly was heavily into Dungeons & Dragons and also inherited his grandfather’s artistic streak. But he decided against going to art school after his father, a surveyor, told him he would never make any money. He chose instead to join the army and thereafter put minimal effort into his A-levels. When a bad injury at Sandhurst ended his army career, he was left with two poor A-level grades and no backup plan. “That was a change in my life, realising you can’t just bet the farm on one outcome and expect the world is going to lay rose petals on your path to greatness,” he has said.
He got into Ealing College of Higher Education (now the University of West London) to study hospitality management, emerging with a job in business publishing. (It was at college that he met his wife, Susie; the couple, who have two sons, are known for their devotion to each other.)
Cleverly’s friends describe him as self-deprecating, readily admitting what he doesn’t know, but not lacking confidence. Knocking on doors as a new Tory activist before the 2001 election, he was struck by black voters’ hostility to voting Conservative. The memo he wrote about how to overcome that found its way via friends of friends to Oliver Letwin, then a policy adviser to the Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Despite his political inexperience, Cleverly found himself in Duncan Smith’s office explaining his ideas for detoxifying the Tory brand. He worked with the then shadow cabinet minister Dominic Grieve, building links with faith groups and community associations, and was elected to the London assembly in 2008.
The businessman and former Tory mayoral contender Steven Norris sat on the London Development Agency board with Cleverly and instantly took to him. “He’s such an easy man to like – he’s not pompous, he’s great company,” says Norris, who praises the “brilliant” job Cleverly did as foreign secretary in projecting a more affable impression of Britain abroad. But he didn’t come across as an embryonic party leader. “There’s no great Cleverly philosophy. He’s a man who has got where he probably never dreamed he would get in a British government, but has done so on the basis of just being a really nice guy, somebody who could disarm the most unwilling and aggressive recipient of his glad-handing.” This disarming quality has made him useful to four successive prime ministers.
The close partnership Cleverly and Boris Johnson forged at City Hall endured well into parliament, after Cleverly won the safe seat of Braintree in Essex in 2015. Although they are very different in some ways, both are incurable optimists. “His instinct is to be a glass-three-quarters-full guy,” says Katwala, who notes that while Cleverly often describes Britain as the best country in the world in which to be black, and emphasises progress made over his lifetime, he doesn’t deny the continued existence of racism. “He has a lot of empathy with younger people [who feel differently].”
Like Johnson, he is also a natural communicator, but sometimes careless with it. He once had to apologise for calling the Lib Dem Simon Hughes a “dick” on his blog; as a new MP, he was drawn into a game of “snog, marry, avoid” on the radio in which he said he would choose to snog the then home secretary, Theresa May. Aides say he will often end a meeting with a joke, usually at his own expense. But the tasteless “date rape” remark, plus an incident where he was forced to deny calling the Stockton North constituency “a shit-hole” in parliament, suggest he has yet to learn when to keep it for the officers’ mess.
His politics are, however, less crude than his language. His backing for Brexit in 2016 seemingly stemmed from his enthusiasm for free markets and free trade, but he was never “wild-eyed” about it, says a fellow MP. That flexibility made him useful to May, who made him deputy party chair in 2018 before sending him to the Department for Exiting the EU in 2019 for one last doomed attempt to push through her Brexit deal. In the ensuing leadership contest, Cleverly precociously announced that he would run before swiftly withdrawing and backing his old ally Johnson – who duly made him co-chair of the party (alongside Queen Camilla’s nephew, Ben Elliot.)
But the partnership didn’t work out. After the 2019 election, he was demoted to the Foreign Office, serving under Dominic Raab and then Liz Truss. He returned to cabinet as a caretaker education secretary after Boris Johnson resigned in July 2022, holding the fort through a leadership contest. When Truss won, she made him foreign secretary, a job he initially kept under Rishi Sunak and didn’t want to leave, at first, for the Home Office.
Civil servants, aides and ministers describe a diligent and popular minister, if not a particularly visionary one. “He gets on with people, praises them and works with them, rather than shouting at them,” says one former colleague of Cleverly at the Foreign Office. “How much original thought there is there, I don’t know. But when you’re looking for a steady pair of hands, that’s what he was.”
Having covered policing during his London assembly days, he has worked hard in recent weeks to heal a rift with the Metropolitan police caused by his predecessor accusing them of going soft on leftwing protesters. But an early attempt to cool the anti-immigrant rhetoric, in an interview where he cautioned against getting fixated on the Rwanda policy, went down badly with MPs worried about a resurgent Nigel Farage – and hasn’t been repeated. It was a reminder that, whatever his instincts, ultimately he serves a prime minister running out of political room to manoeuvre.
Cleverly has been through similarly challenging times perhaps once before, at the Foreign Office. He wasn’t the lead minister on Afghanistan during Britain’s shambolic 2021 retreat from Kabul, which saw Afghans who had worked closely with British troops abandoned to their fate, and a subsequent select committee report (which blamed Foreign Office failure to anticipate a Taliban resurgence, plus ministers’ failure to challenge the assurances they were given) did not attach blame to him. But it was a chastening time for the department as a whole – and one from which he may have learned lessons.
“He knew what his job was, which was to ask the best questions he could of officials and try to make sure that what they were telling him was OK actually was,” says one source who worked with Cleverly subsequently and describes him as charming but “very directional – not afraid to tell people what he wants”.
That period was also tough for more personal reasons: in December 2021, his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, leaving him openly distraught. For much of 2022, he supported her through gruelling treatment while his day job became a dizzying carousel of leadership contests.
Although loyal to Johnson until the end, Cleverly was by then also part of the “Greenwich set” of free-market Tories all living near each other in south London, including his Foreign Office boss Truss and her old friend Kwasi Kwarteng. After Johnson resigned in July 2022, Cleverly set up camp in Truss’s kitchen to work the phones for her leadership bid. Although the recent parliamentary revolt against his Rwanda bill ultimately fizzled out, he cannot have enjoyed seeing Truss join the rebels on an issue fast becoming a test run for the next leadership contest.
Facing down the revolt is likely to cost Cleverly support on the right. But can he manage not to alienate the moderate MPs now considering supporting him while overseeing the most toxic issue in government? “Ultimately, it will depend what the choices are. Colleagues recognise that if you are in the Home Office it’s a rotten place to be: you are going to have to take some difficult decisions,” says one likely supporter. “If, however, you’re better than the worst choice, you get a tick in the box for that.” Careers in politics were founded on less.
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