With less than a week to go until MPs vote in the Tory leadership race, a row has blown up over an unlikely cause. A quarrel in a far away country is causing a rupture between the two men whom most colleagues think could be next to go out: Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly. Both are fishing in the same waters for votes on the centre and left of the party. Of the two, Cleverly was perceived as having given the better speech yesterday at Tory conference. But the government’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius could revive old fears about Cleverly’s judgement.
Following the announcement this morning, the Shadow Home Secretary rushed to condemn the news. He declared that it showed ‘weak, weak, weak’ government, adding ‘Labour lied to get into office. Said they’d be whiter than white, said they wouldn’t put up taxes, said they’d stand up to the EU, said that they be patriotic. All lies!’ Yet, as others were quick to point out, it was in November 2022 that negotiations over the future of the islands first began between the Foreign Office and their Mauritian counterparts. The Foreign Secretary at the time? James Cleverly.
He told MPs on 3 November 2022 that:
Following the meeting between the then Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), and Prime Minister Jugnauth at the UN General Assembly, the UK and Mauritius have decided to begin negotiations on the exercise of sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)/Chagos archipelago… The UK and Mauritius have agreed to engage in constructive negotiations, with a view to arriving at an agreement by early next year.
Admittedly, Cleverly did not sign off the talks in his fifteen months at the Foreign Office – unlike David Lammy who has done so after three. But Tom Tugendhat has not been slow to point out that Cleverly did nothing to stop talks progressing. Shortly after the government’s announcement today, he called it a ‘shameful retreat’ but added that ‘it was disgraceful that these negotiations started under our watch.’ He went further on the World At One, telling the BBC:
I objected to these negotiations happening when they began in November ’22. I objected on many occasions. This is another area where I’m afraid we see legalism replacing leadership and we saw this legalism in the Foreign Office in November ’22 when the Foreign Office was pushing for this and nobody stopped it until finally, we got leadership under Lord Cameron.
The conclusion is obvious: Tugendhat thinks Cleverly was either unwilling or unable to stand up to civil servants over the future of the islands. It is a charge which resonates with the private concerns of some Tory MPs who fear that Cleverly did not challenge advice from officials in successive government briefs. Supporters of the Braintree MP argue that this is unfair. They point to his success in cutting migration at the Home Office and suggest that his willingness to champion, rather than denigrate, civil servants helped mend relations after the unhappy tenure of Suella Braverman.
But it was perhaps notable that on Sunday, when asked by Trevor Phillips whether Israel had ‘crossed any red lines this week’, Cleverly refused to be drawn, arguing he could not answer without being in possession of the full facts. ‘Because we are in opposition,’ he said, ‘I am no longer able to access the detailed reporting that I did when I was Foreign Secretary and when I was Home Secretary’. For some, such an answer will speak to Cleverly’s honesty and self-awareness; for others, it will suggest an overreliance on the civil service machine.
It will be up to Tory MPs to draw their own conclusions about the merits of the four candidates. But given that Cleverly is keen to present himself as a safe pair of hands, supporters of Tom Tugendhat will note how eagerly he rushed to attack Labour on the Chagos Islands – despite his own record here. Rival MPs have already started sharing screenshots from Hansard of Cleverly’s statement from November 2022.
With both men polling 21 votes each last month, every misstep will be scrutinised by the handful of MPs deciding which of Cleverly or Tugendhat would be best placed to face the members.
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