James Cleverly: I like Farage but Reform are a one-man band

Times

3 days ago

Where many Tories view Nigel Farage as a menacing bogeyman, Sir James Cleverly is prepared to admit that he likes him.
'I've met him a couple of times,' Cleverly says. 'He's fun, he's funny, he's interesting. He's a very, very good communicator. He's very good at holding fort. He's a very clubbable person.'
But for Cleverly, a Tory big beast who this week returned to the shadow cabinet, Farage has an inherent limitation: there is only one of him. 'The challenge he's got is that he's the only one in his party that you can describe in those terms,' Cleverly says. 'It's fine for what they've been doing at the moment, which is having him as the lead singer and everyone else if basically the backing band. But if you're going to be taken seriously as a party of government, that's nowhere near enough. As much as he's smart and funny and talented, he's not omnipresent.'
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Who, Cleverly rhetorically asks, are Farage's shadow chancellor, shadow home secretary and shadow defence secretary? 'The fact is he hasn't got any of them. That's nowhere near good enough to be taken seriously as an alternative party of government. The British people deserve better. He's their biggest advantage and their biggest disadvantage.'
Farage 'crumbles' when pushed for details, Cleverly adds. 'We're now seeing that as soon as he's asked even for an order of magnitude explanation to the cost of some of his ideas he totally falls apart. When he's trying to outbid Labour on welfare spending, when you talk to him about how he's going to do that whilst also cutting taxes, he falls apart.'
Cleverly was the big name in Kemi Badenoch's mini-reshuffle this week. Last October he dropped out of the Tory leadership contest after being bested by a margin of only four votes, going from runaway favourite to also-ran in an instant. Some of his supporters later admitted that they were so confident Cleverly would make it to the final pairing that they backed one of his rivals, a move designed to improve his chances of winning the overall contest. That turned out to be a catastrophic error.
Cleverly decided to take a break. 'I'd come off the back of being foreign secretary, home secretary,' he says. 'During much of the previous couple of years Susie [his wife] was going through her cancer treatment, which actually impacted me more than I realised at the time. Then we went into an incredibly bruising general election campaign and instead of taking a breather over the summer I threw myself into a leadership campaign. At this point I realised that I did actually need a bit of time, a bit more time with Susie, a bit of time with the family.'
Did he enjoy his time off? In fact it was a 'pretty turbulent' period, Cleverly says. At the beginning of the year one of his closest friends from his army days died after developing oesophageal cancer. 'In the early part of the new year I was with him when he died,' Cleverly says. 'The weekend after, my brother-in-law — Susie's younger brother — had a catastrophic heart attack and he died. And then, just over a week ago, my father died. So the first half of this year has been pretty full on.'
When Cleverly was approached by the Conservatives' chief whip last week, he decided it was time for a return. He is now shadowing Angela Rayner's community and housing brief.
'I genuinely thought Labour would mess up,' he says. 'But they were messing up at such a rate [it] meant we had to get back on the front foot more quickly than perhaps anyone had envisaged. We didn't have the time in opposition to build up slowly and gently.'
It does not look good for the Tories. Under Badenoch they have gone backwards in the polls and there have been complaints in the shadow cabinet about her leadership and her strategy. Some shadow ministers think she will be ousted after November, when the one-year protection period shielding her from a leadership challenge expires.
'Let's not do the whole kind of, 'Throw a leader under the bus and see if it works this time',' Cleverly says. 'It hasn't worked the last three or four times we've done it. My strong advice is [that] our effort, our time, our energy, our focus, is much, much better directed at making sure Kemi succeeds as leader. Kemi won fair and square. She's got strong ideas, she is a staunch Conservative.'
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Some of the attacks on Badenoch have been vituperative. The New Statesman reported that some Tories believe she is pulling her punches on illegal migration because she is an 'anchor baby', a term used in the United States to refer to people who ensure their children are born in a country in order to gain residency. Badenoch has said she was born in the UK because her mother, who is from Nigeria, came to get medical care at a private hospital. 'The idea of living in the UK and moving to the UK was not something that was at the forefront,' she has said.
Cleverly says the attacks originate on the left and highlights the abuse he has suffered because his mother came to Britain from Sierra Leone. 'There's a particularly pernicious type of left-wing racism which rears its ugly head surprisingly regularly,' he says. 'This is one of the things I find really, really, really unpalatable. I had this when I was home secretary, when I was tough on migration. And people said, 'You're such a hypocrite to try to crack down on small boats because your mum was an immigrant'.
'Which implied that in the eyes of some people all immigrants are the same. That somehow my mum … playing by the rules, filling in the forms, joining the queue and spending a whole working life in the NHS, that somehow she is the same as someone that's paid a criminal to get here on a small boat. That I find incredibly distasteful.
'And sadly, it's unsurprising that Kemi is having these kind of accusations flung at her. I know she has got a bit of an armoured hide when it comes to this kind of comment, so I can't imagine she's staying awake over comments like that.'
The Tories, he says, are still experiencing the wrath of voters after their 'comprehensive' defeat at the general election. 'You talk to voters [and] last year's general election feels a heartbeat away. They are still angry with us about the things they were angry with us about at the general election. There is a residual frustration with us and a newfound frustration with the Labour Party.'
Cleverly's critics often call him a centrist. They point to his position on the European Court of Human Rights — he has repeatedly said it is no 'silver bullet' — and his criticism of the 'neo-Luddites' on the right opposed to green technology and who think that climate change campaigners are 'scaremongering'. Cleverly says those critics are wrong and describes himself as a 'Thatcherite Reaganite'. His leadership platform included a 'really significant reduction in welfare spending' and committing the party to spending 3 per cent on defence in government.
Badenoch has committed to scrapping the net zero 2050 target, a position Cleverly agrees with. 'When we, as a party, were making that commitment on that timescale, it was prior to Russia's invasion [of] Ukraine, prior to much of the current conflict in the Middle East,' he says. 'The timetables that we set out before those major events are no longer tenable.
'We shouldn't be capping wells in the North Sea. We shouldn't be putting lead in our own saddles when it comes to competing on a global market. We shouldn't be throwing heavy industry under a bus. But while making sure we protect ourselves here, we should still be looking to take full advantage of the direction of travel in green technologies and energy technologies.'
Badenoch is widely expected to announce at the autumn's party conference that she is committing the party to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). She has commissioned a review by Lord Wolfson, the shadow attorney-general, to look at the issue in the meantime. Will Cleverly back leaving the ECHR?
'The lesson we learnt from Brexit is if you want to make a big change like that, you have to have a delivery plan,' he says. 'Boring as this may sound, I'm actually going to wait for this incredibly smart and thoughtful person to do the analysis before I make a final judgment.'
He is concerned about 'judicial activism', however. 'There are tensions that are being stoked because of perverse decisions by the immigration tribunal, through the judicial review process. What message does that send to people that have actually done the right thing and voted?'
Cleverly says he feels sympathy for those protesting peacefully outside migrant hotels. 'I understand why they're so very, very angry,' he says. 'I understand why they look to the government that made a whole load of bold promises, who thought it was all going to be so terribly easy, and have let those communities down. Where I absolutely do not have any sympathy is for people who travel across the country to try to turn peaceful community protests into a violent, clickbait protest. Hijacking community concerns is something that should be responded to forcefully by the courts, by the police.'
Surely the Conservatives were part of the problem? The failure to stop small boats crossing the Channel led to tens of thousands of people being housed in asylum hotels.
'I completely recognise that this very visible and very alarming spike in illegal migration … shot up while we were in government,' he says. 'The focus we had on this was relentless. We were willing to try a whole range of things. And that's in part where the Rwanda plan came from, looking at doing things really fundamentally different, as well as beefing up the National Crime Agency's work in Europe, disrupting criminal gangs, arresting people, deporting people.'
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Labour, he says, showed an 'appalling lack of planning and foresight' and its decision to cancel the plan to sent migrants to Rwanda was 'absolutely toxic'.
On housing, Cleverly says he wants to make it easier to 'go up a little bit' by building new levels on existing buildings, as well as ensuring there is 'greater density' in cities with good-quality housing. He also could look at property taxes to help people get on the ladder.
His overall message is that the Tories do not need to 'reinvent the wheel'. 'What we need to do is update the way we present that to a new generation of voters,' he says. 'But conservative principles are sound and we don't need to drift away from those conservative principles. And that's the reason we've been such a successful political party.'
However, the Tories cannot afford to be passive and must go after the voters who have defected to other parties. 'We can't just rely on them to come back, we've got to go and get them,' he says. 'We need to be hunters, not farmers. We need to make the case. People voted for other political parties for a reason. And we need to go get them back.'
Kemi Badenoch of Robert Jenrick? Kemi. We have got to give her a chance.
Nigel Farage or Keir Starmer? Neither. They can go in a room together and talk about their ineptitude.
British & Irish Lions or the English cricket team? Lions. I'm a rugby player.
Opposition or government? Government. David Cameron always said a day in government is better than a year in opposition.