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”.
