The Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, stands accused, according to a headline in The Sunday Telegraph, of treating his role “like a continuous photoshoot”, while failing to stand up for Britain’s “hard interests”.
The actual article reveals that it is the Foreign Office which is condemned, by an unnamed minister, for neglecting this country’s hard interests.
But it is true that during the 11 months Cleverly has so far spent in the role, photographs have been taken of him firing a bow and arrow while wearing Kazakh national dress, cooking a popular Brazilian dish during a Latin American tour, and donning batik shirts in Jakarta.
And some Conservative MPs certainly think Cleverly has been excessively subservient to Foreign Office advice, which includes appeasing China and Saudi Arabia.
In June, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former Tory leader, told The Mail on Sunday:
“Cleverly is a total wet rag, who wants to fly out to China to kiss the backside of a regime responsible for shocking abuses of human rights, which poses a serious threat to our national interests.”
Cleverly’s defenders retort that he has restored morale at the Foreign Office, which fell to rock bottom under his predecessors, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson.
They say he is brilliant at schmoozing his officials, and more important, is brilliant at schmoozing foreigners. Sir Ivor Roberts, former British Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Ireland and Italy, wrote in Monday’s Daily Telegraph:
“His leadership approach has been one of listening to advice then taking decisions based on that advice and sound common sense rather than adjusting the decisions to fit a previously conceived vision.”
The same point was made in a less friendly way by a former Foreign Office minister, who reported a senior official saying:
“Yes we like Cleverly. He knows nothing. He behaves well. He does what he’s told.”
Such bitchiness does not do justice to the Foreign Secretary. A Cabinet colleague who knows him, but is not an intimate, praised him as “very genial and professional”, with “good political judgment”, and recalled drinks in a minister’s room before the EU Referendum.
Cleverly, a Leaver and a rugby fan, suggested at this gathering that the forthcoming contest would be like a rugby match into which the two sides would hurl themselves with abandon, after which they would go for a drink together.
Unfortunately, this colleague added, the aftermath of the referendum had been “closer to Passchendaele than Twickenham”. But this does not invalidate Cleverly’s insight that Conservatives do actually need to be able to mend fences and get on with each other.
This was his pitch in 2019, when he told his local paper, The Braintree and Witham Times, he was entering the contest to succeed Theresa May:
“Both the country, and my party, are beset with division. We cannot bring the country back together unless the party of government is united, and the party cannot unite if it is led from its fringes.”
A few days later, he withdrew his candidacy, having received the support of only three other MPs in what was at that stage an overcrowded race. But this does not mean his message was wrong.
Those who imagine conservatism can be reduced to an ideology, which must vanquish other ideologies, overlook the role the party has often played, for example under Baldwin, in reconciling conflict, promoting One Nation instead of class war.
Cleverly admires Disraeli and Thatcher, and enjoys pointing out that the Conservatives have often been more successful than any other party at bringing newcomers to politics into Downing Street.
In 2018, when Dawn Butler accused Jamie Oliver of cultural appropriation for launching a product called “jerk rice”, Cleverly retorted in a series of tweets that the UK “has always been a magpie nation” which adopts elements of the other cultures with which it interacts, including recipes from all over the world, and English words borrowed from European and many other languages.
Cleverly, born in 1969, himself illustrates this point, being of mixed African and English parentage. His mother, a midwife, was from Sierra Leone, while his father, a surveyor who ran his own business, was from a Wiltshire family.
They sent him to Colfe’s School, an ancient foundation in south-east London which had recently gone private in order to escape forcible conversion from a grammar to a comprehensive.
He hoped to follow other members of his family into the Army, but an injury suffered in training put paid to that, so instead he took a BA in Hospitality Management Studies at Ealing College of Higher Education.
On her first day studying at that college, Susie Sparks met him as he was serving behind the student bar. They married in 2000 and have two sons. She is popular with other Conservatives, and the fortitude with which she bore the ordeal of her recent treatment for breast cancer commanded general admiration.
Soon after leaving university, Cleverly set up his own magazine and digital publishing business. At the same time he followed his military vocation by joining and remaining in the Territorial Army as a Gunner, now with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
In 2008 he was elected a Member of the London Assembly for Bexley and Bromley. He supported the new Mayor, Boris Johnson, served in various capacities under him, and in 2015 entered the Commons as Member for Braintree, in Essex.
In his maiden speech Cleverly said:
“Braintree has pre-Roman roots and was a medieval market town, but came into its own in the 16th century when Flemish weavers came to the town and brought with them their state of the art weaving techniques, heralding 250 years of future prosperity. Blooming foreigners!”
At the end of his speech he said:
“We live in an increasingly competitive global economy and we, as a nation, must rise to that challenge or be swept aside. The challenge from former colonial countries now competing and in some cases overtaking us cannot be ignored. Throughout our nation’s history we have been at our best when we are globally focused on international trade—when we are indeed a nation of shopkeepers.”
One sees a man at ease with Britain’s history who thinks we should remain true to it.
As a new MP, looking far more relaxed than he does now he bears the burden of high office, Cleverly submitted himself to three minutes of quickfire questions from John Pienaar on BBC radio:
Pienaar: “Have you ever looked at online porn?”
Cleverly: “Yes.”
Pienaar: “Have you ever taken illegal drugs?”
Cleverly: “Yes.”
Pienaar: “What, James, did private school do for you that a state school wouldn’t have done?”
Cleverly: “Well my Mum, from Sierra Leone, flatly refused to let me to go to the local state school. She believed the quality of education was really really important.”
Pienaar: “Was she right?”
Cleverly: “Well it was a day school, it was in south-east London, ethnically mixed demographic, but it really showed me a lot of people make a lot of personal sacrifices for the benefit of their children, and that’s something I feel very very strongly about.”
Pienaar: “Do you believe in God?”
Cleverly: “No.”
Pienaar: “Snog, marry, avoid Rita Ora?”
Cleverly: “Snog.”
Pienaar: “Theresa May?”
Cleverly: “Snog.”
One finds greater candour, and less fear of emotion, than in the usual run of career politician. He sounded as if he was being himself, and could see the funny side of being himself.
Often he wears his Gunner tie, as when, his voice breaking with emotion, he paid tribute in the Commons to PC Keith Palmer, murdered in a terrorist attack, whom he had first met 25 years before when they were both serving in the Royal Artillery.
May gave him his first steps on the ladder of promotion, as Deputy Party Chairman and then junior Brexit minister, and when Boris Johnson succeeded her in July 2019 he made him Party Chairman, jointly with Ben Elliot, Cleverly being capable of taking on a difficult morning media round.
That was followed from February 2020 by over two years as Minister of State at the Foreign Office, which looks like a training post, but has also rendered him more vulnerable to the charge of getting too steeped in his department.
In May 2021 Cleverly was one of only 30 guests at the wedding of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, and posted a picture on Twitter of the happy couple, the groom in shirt sleeves, the bride bare-footed in her wedding dress, a garland of flowers about her head.
During the dying days of the Johnson administration, July to September 2022, Cleverly served as Education Secretary.
When Truss became Prime Minister she showed there was still a place at the top table for a Johnson supporter by making Cleverly her successor as Foreign Secretary. Rishi Sunak has kept him in that elevated post, but has not enabled him to feel secure.
Harold Macmillan remarked, after eight months in 1955 as Foreign Secretary, that the holder of the role “is forever poised between the cliché and the indiscretion”.
In this great office it is harder for Cleverly to play his natural game. Last month in the United States, at the Aspen Security Forum, he said:
“If anyone in the UK is watching, listening, particularly you Prime Minister, I very much want to stay put … I very much want to stay put as Foreign Secretary. It’s a job that I love…
“This is the job that I know, the job that I like to think I’m good at, and the job that I absolutely adore. So my plan is to stay put. If I’m going to be dragged out at some point in the future, you’ll see the nail marks down the parquet flooring in my office.”
Here was a return to the candour which has served him well in the past. Amid endless travels round the globe, endless platitudes exchanged by delegations across conference tables, endless photo opportunities to make the whole process look less dull, a man needs sometimes to let off steam.
Less than a month before Aspen, Cleverly had denied reports by “allies” that, frustrated by Tory infighting and anxious to spend more time with his wife as she recovered, he was thinking of standing down at the next election. He tweeted that he would be standing and had been readopted by his association.
A former ministerial colleague describes him as “thoroughly decent, reliable and good”. Many Conservative MPs regard Cleverly with affection, and some argue that foreign affairs don’t win elections, so there is no point in moving him.
But complaints that “he’ll do whatever the Foreign Office wants him to do”, he lacks the intellectual self-confidence to overrule officials, and the FO is itself “bogged down by process”, are also heard.
When something difficult comes up, John Bew, the Prime Minister’s adviser on foreign affairs, is sent to Washington or Paris or Brussels. The key decisions are made in No 10. Perhaps it suits the Prime Minister to have an acquiescent Foreign Secretary.
But part of the charm of politics is that nobody knows what is going to happen next. If a mainstream candidate is needed, when next the Conservative leadership is contested, in order to stop some more ideological figure such as Kemi Badenoch, it is just possible that Cleverly might fit the bill. But he could also become, within a few years, a former Foreign Secretary whose name is barely remembered.