When is the best time to hit the front of a Tory leadership contest? In the final chain of the final furlong after coming up unseen on the rails, obviously. As charismatic front-runners from Michael Heseltine to Michael Portillo have found out, Conservative leadership battles are brutal for the established heir apparent. There is something about the Tory tribe, or perhaps the Tory disposition, which creates a mania for dragging them down. It’s far safer to do a John Major and be christened as the best ‘Stop X’ or least-unpalatable-option candidate at the last by the party establishment.
So congratulations to James Cleverly for gaining momentum so deep into the current race. Kemi Badenoch had been seen as hot favourite for months, while Robert Jenrick may have thought his timing perfect when he displaced her in the betting a couple of weeks back. But both endured torrid times at the party conference. Cleverly, meanwhile, emerged in Birmingham as the likeable, pragmatic alternative.
Is Cleverly a merchant for going along with prevailing wisdom rather than a genuine leader?
But hold up: perhaps it’s still too soon. Even though we are only days away from the last two rounds of MP voting that will send a surviving duo before the whole party membership, the newly fashionable Cleverly has caught a crab.
The huge row over Keir Starmer ceding sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is threatening to engulf him. Cleverly was the foreign secretary who set in motion formal talks on resolving the dispute over sovereignty and who raised expectations about getting the issue settled in short order. Tom Tugendhat, his rival on the Tory left, has expertly exposed his vulnerability on the matter. One Tory MP has even been quoted by the Independent as saying: ‘This was Cleverly’s Chagos deal, David Lammy just got it over the line.’
That is overstating things rather. But the issue nonetheless is bound to lead to added scrutiny of Cleverly’s weaknesses as a practitioner of politics at the highest level: is he a merchant for going along with prevailing wisdom rather than a genuine leader? Does he lack intellectual curiosity or even a narrative about where Britain has gone wrong and how to put it right? Both Badenoch and Jenrick delivered restless addresses at conference in this regard. Cleverly just launched ‘JC and the sunshine brand’.
He claimed to have cut net immigration by 300,000 as home secretary. He didn’t. In fact he was merely in post when tougher measures primarily advanced by Jenrick as immigration minister were finally implemented. He claimed to have been getting on top of illegal migration. He wasn’t. On his watch, numbers coming on Channel dinghies were surging again. Jenrick was surely right that a tougher deterrent was required.
Even his heartfelt thank you to health workers for his wife’s successful treatment for breast cancer was instructive in this regard. It was not followed by any stated intention or plan to ensure general cancer outcomes in the NHS are raised up to meet the standards of other advanced nations, behind which they presently lag.
Cleverly singled out Ronald Reagan as his political hero, citing the infectious optimism of ‘the Gipper’ and at once associating himself with it. But were he to reach the highest office, might he not find himself exposed as another political JC with a sunny disposition once did?
James Callaghan – ‘Sunny Jim’ – had already served as foreign secretary and home secretary when he became prime minister. But he was engulfed by the pathologies afflicting Britain, to which his likeable demeanour proved no answer and in the face of which he was intellectually adrift. His cheerfulness had become positively annoying to the electorate by the time he returned from a sun-kissed conference in Guadeloupe radiating complacency in the face of our winter of discontent.
Installing someone as warm and likeable as Cleverly as Tory leader when Britain has a prime minister as charmless and unlikeable in public as Keir Starmer is not necessarily the worst idea in the world. But Ronald Reagan, like Margaret Thatcher, was underpinned by great ideas. The easy charm would never have been enough on its own to make him an outstanding national leader. Sunshine alone cannot win the day.
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