‘I kept saying there aren’t many votes to play with . . . ’

James Cleverly is immersed in his mobile when I finally hurtle into Kerridge’s off Embankment. The former foreign secretary and Tory member of parliament has been waiting half an hour. A mix-up — which we both uncharitably blame, with a conspiratorial smile, on his adviser’s enunciation — meant that at the appointed hour I had been seated at Claridge’s in Mayfair. One black cab later, we are finally dining at the same table.

Miming a traditional meditation pose, he declares himself “Zen” about my lateness — although I presume a man who I notice wears two watches, a Breitling on his left wrist and an Apple Watch on his right, is usually rather punctual. 

He is Zen too, he insists, about the extraordinary arc of fortune in recent weeks that seemingly propelled him to pole position in the Conservative leadership race — only to exit in a shock elimination before reaching the final round of voting.

We are meeting on Tuesday, four days before the result of the contest is due to be announced. A staunch rightwinger will win; Cleverly had been the last Tory moderate in the race. 

Former business secretary Kemi Badenoch is the bookmakers’ favourite and most Conservative MPs’ tip to beat ex-immigration minister Robert Jenrick. While the MPs whittled down the field to the last two, the party members are voting in the run-off.

It is the first time Cleverly, 55, has spoken publicly about the spectacular implosion of his campaign — and it is obviously still raw. “I’m good, I’m all right, no genuinely, I’m in a good place,” he insists. We are offered some water by a waitress in a burgundy apron. 

And how are you really? “It’s quite weird, yeah it’s quite weird,” he relents. “I’ve been at sprint pace, certainly, for the past four years . . . Now it’s not quite so sprint pace.”

A full-time politician since 2008, when he joined the London Assembly, and MP for Braintree in Essex since 2015, he was first promoted to the Cabinet in 2019 by Boris Johnson, who made him Tory party chair. He has since served as foreign secretary and home secretary — two of the four so-called great offices of state. 

Now out of government, after the Conservatives suffered a catastrophic rout at the UK general election in July, and out of the party leadership contest, he reflects he has “more choice about what I do, what I focus on — that’s actually really nice . . . You’ve got to grab the positives out of every situation.” 

Vote for the thing you want, don’t vote against the thing you don’t want

But he has also been processing how his leadership bid unravelled so dramatically at the eleventh hour. “No one will really know,” he says slowly, before venturing: “I think I know what happened.” 

A wine trolley rattles over to the table. Cleverly mutters that he has a lot of work to do that afternoon, “so I don’t really want to kick the backside out of it”. He settles on a glass of champagne and requests one for each of us.

After a slow start in the race during the summer, a polished performance at the party’s annual conference in Birmingham this autumn “reset the narrative”. Charismatic and self-possessed, he sailed through the four-day marathon of appearances, question and answer sessions and panel events — bolstered by his depth of experience compared to his three rivals.

It was at the finale of the gathering, when the four contenders made their pitches to the party faithful in back-to-back keynote speeches, that he really shone. He seemed in psychological lockstep with his party — contrite for losing the election, but with an upbeat plan to “sell Conservatism with a smile”, and a bald warning to colleagues to “be more normal”. Then too, he vowed with a Reaganite flourish, it could be “morning again” in Britain under a future Tory government.

Cleverly had seized the momentum and the following week, back in parliament, he shot to the top of the leaderboard in the MPs’ ballot as the field was narrowed to three, and was touted as a shoo-in for the final. But in a bombshell result in the next ballot just 24 hours later, somehow he slumped to third place and was knocked out.

Sucking his teeth at the painful memory, he says: “I’d worried that that might happen.” The “alarm bell started going off” when he “lost track” of the number of conversations with his supporters who asked him who he would prefer to face in the final — a hint they were thinking about trying to engineer the contest by voting for someone else. 

“I said over and over again, this Kremlinology is a fool’s game,” he sighs. He told his backers repeatedly: “If you want to help me, the best thing you can do is put me into the final two with a clear mandate from MPs.”

After the party suffered its worst ever election defeat this year — plunging from 365 members of parliament at the previous election to just 121 — he tried to highlight the arithmetical reality: “I kept saying there aren’t many votes to play with . . . it doesn’t take very many people to really distort outcomes.”

Halfway through the last parliament, the idea of Labour having a government, let alone a record majority, was laughable. So it can be made to swing back in one parliament

But Conservative members of parliament take pride in their reputation as the “most sophisticated electorate in the world”. Some even argue privately that “duplicitous” is the more fitting description. The tradition of double dealing, game-playing and back-stabbing in leadership contests is both notorious and long-standing.

The result of the ballot — which Cleverly watched live-streamed on a phone — “came as a bit of a shock . . . oomph, a bit of a punch to the gut”. He returned to his parliamentary office for a hug with his wife Susie. Were there tears of disappointment? He swats away the suggestion. 

He shrugs: “I didn’t get through.” Several colleagues came up to him afterwards and regretfully owned up to too-clever-by-half antics, he says, but he won’t name them. Other members of parliament maintain dirty tactics by the Jenrick or Badenoch camps — which they deny — may better explain events. 

Still, he felt keenly for his staffers who had given up or delayed jobs to work on his campaign. Now, three weeks later, he declares he is phlegmatic. “There’s no point getting bitter . . . There are no guarantees in politics.” 

Nonetheless, he thinks there is an important lesson to be learned: “Vote for the thing you want, don’t vote against the thing you don’t want.” He is not only talking about the pitfalls of his allies voting to block a rival candidate rather than voting in support of him. 

“We’re now seeing it playing out at national level. People voted against us [the Conservatives], rather than for Labour, and those people are now furious with what Labour are doing . . . When you’re voting against something, you might know what you’re getting rid of, but you don’t know what you’re getting.”  

The waitress returns for our order and Cleverly asks to see the “chef’s larder”. Perplexed but curious, I traipse off with him. We are walked to a glass cabinet housing enormous, glistening hunks of meat atop slate-capped pink Himalayan salt blocks. Cleverly chooses a modest looking lamb T-bone, noticeably the smallest option. As I don’t eat meat, I demur.

Back at the table, I hear footsteps approaching and a familiar voice strike up. “Hi James, oh hi Lucy.” It’s Cleverly’s ex-boss, former UK prime minister Liz Truss, who has wandered over on her way out. 

I wonder whether Kerridge’s is something of a local haunt for Cleverly. But it turns out he’s never been before. He chose the restaurant, he says, because the eponymous chef Tom Kerridge “is famously good with meat” and he himself is “a bit of a meat eater”.

To start, Cleverly chooses duck liver parfait, which comes with a brioche slice standing proud in a toast rack, while I have the dressed crab royale served in a martini glass. 

Mine looks, at first glance, a little “technical” for my liking: confit egg yolk, with mysterious green viscosity and brown crab jelly sandwiching the white crabmeat. But it is, I admit, delicious. 

Cleverly declares his liver delectable too. “It’s all very decadent,” he says, adding he “can’t get away with” such rich dishes too often. Does he consider himself a gastronome? “I went to catering college!” he says by way of an answer.

Detractors seize on his hospitality degree as evidence of his lack of intellectual firepower. He defends the qualification, however, undertaken after an injury derailed his plans to become a British army officer and before he began a career in magazine publishing. “I studied economics, accountancy, marketing — it was a business degree.”

I wonder aloud if he is the victim of snobbery. “Jealousy,” he shoots back. “I was the first of my intake [of members of parliament] to become Cabinet, foreign secretary, home secretary, fiendishly good looking, gorgeous wife, beautiful sons.”

Less bullish, he adds: “I just find it interesting when people say, ‘Oh yeah, Cleverly’ with that slight roll of the eyes. And I’m like, if I’d peaked at parliamentary under-secretary [a junior rank of minister], then, yeah, OK, fair comment.”

He believes his critics’ description of him as “gaffe-prone” is also unfair, but his bluff, hail-fellow-well-met persona has undoubtedly landed him in trouble. He winces when I raise the time he joked about spiking his wife’s drink. “That was crass . . . It was a crappy joke and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.” He is particularly “frustrated” that his silly quip “completely obscured the good thing” he did in policy terms — toughening spiking laws.

The son of an NHS midwife who came to Britain from Sierra Leone, and a small businessman from Wiltshire, Cleverly grew up a mixed-race boy in 1970s south London, where the National Front marched through the streets. “Racism is real,” he says.

He is uninterested in identity politics, however. He rarely highlights his status as Britain’s first Black foreign secretary, although Foreign Office mandarins say African allies registered his appointment with strong approval.

Nor does he profess any excitement about the prospect of Badenoch becoming the first Black Tory leader this weekend. “No one, that I’m aware of, is making that point of differentiation” between her and Jenrick, he says, adding that it is “the right questions” that are dominating the contest: about the candidates’ ideas, policy and philosophy.

Warming to his theme, he says of his Tory colleagues: “None of us do this kind of ‘firsts’ thing — that’s a Labour thing. Rachel Reeves keeps talking about being the first female chancellor. That might have been a thing, had it not been for the fact we [the Conservatives] have had three female prime ministers.”

Cleverly’s lamb arrives — “very nice” — along with my Cornish plaice with tangy warm tartare sauce. We share some potatoes and ignore a bowl of roasted carrots that materialises.

Looking to the future, he cautions “it’s not a given” that the Tories have reached electoral rock bottom — they could yet tumble further. But he also brands it “absolute nonsense” to suggest that his party could not win back power at the next election from its current nadir. Many of his colleagues disagree, however, believing it will take more than one cycle. 

“Halfway through the last parliament, the idea of Labour having a government, let alone a record majority, was laughable,” he argues. “So if the pendulum can swing that aggressively away in half a parliament, it is not inevitable, but it can be made to swing back in one parliament.” 

His prescription: “We’ve got to be disciplined.” By contrast, a rightwing agenda “without the discipline of worrying about delivery” is what is on offer from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Impossible populist solutions are “seductive” but “reinforcing cynicism”, he frets. 

I’m not particularly in the mood to be boxed back into a narrow band again

Outside the light is fading, bringing the flickering candlelight of the dining room into warmer focus. Surveying the sultry decor, Cleverly admires the dark green walls. We skip pudding in favour of strong black coffee. Two mini cookies are left uneaten.  

He has voted in the leadership contest, but will not confirm whether he backed Badenoch or Jenrick. He resolutely refuses to critique — let alone criticise — either candidate, conceding only that he does not “always agree” with them. 

All three indicated they envisaged a smaller state and lower taxes. But Cleverly did not share Badenoch’s crusade against “woke” ideology, while he diverged from Jenrick over his vows to quit the European Convention on Human Rights and to radically reduce net inward migration to “tens of thousands” of people annually.

While he insists he will do everything he can to ensure the victor is a “roaring success”, he reveals he will do so from the backbenches for now — he is not planning to serve in the next leader’s team as a shadow minister. 

Finally “liberated” during the leadership race from the constraints of a single portfolio for the first time in 16 years in frontline politics, he explains: “I’m not particularly in the mood to be boxed back into a narrow band again.”

Education, the economy, an ageing population, and broader societal and cultural issues — including the question of what it means to be British — are among the subjects he wants to debate publicly.

The Tories need to broaden their appeal to make progress. “Elections are about numbers. I know this is ironic, seeing as I missed out on the numbers to get to the final two, but the first thing you need to do is work out, where is the coalition of voters that are going to vote you into government. What do they think? . . . How can you persuade them? 

“It’s not chasing after them, but you have to make sure you’re palatable enough to enough voters, because being ‘right’, but in opposition, that’s just self indulgent.”

While he studiously avoids blue-on-blue assaults, Cleverly patently relishes attacking Labour. Sir Keir Starmer’s economic plans are “brutal” and risk injecting “economic poison” into the UK system, he says. 

“We are going to be the most highly taxed ever and on top of that, I strongly suspect that it’s going to be borrowing on a scale that we are unused to outside of emergencies,” he says of the Budget this week. “The risk of capital flight is very, very real, the risk of brain drain is huge.”

We’ve been talking for more than two hours. Cleverly finally moves to check the time — though reaches for his mobile to do so, rather than checking either of his watches. It’s time to go shortly. 

Would he consider another tilt at the leadership in future? And what of his name being linked with a Tory London mayoral bid in 2028? “I’m not going to rule anything in or anything out,” he says in response to both, which tends to be politician-speak for a vigorous expression of interest. 

After protesting — perhaps a little feebly — that the idea of City Hall “hadn’t even crossed my mind”, he says of his party: “We do need to fight back in London. We need to fight back across big, big, big chunks of the country.”

Lucy Fisher is the FT’s Whitehall editor

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