Why James Cleverly Wants The Conservative Party To Be Less ‘moany’

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Keir Starmer is a prime minister in a hurry. Having already picked through a litany of contentious issues in his first few months in No 10, Starmer today is focussing on another: illegal immigration.

For this, the PM is in Rome, holding meetings with his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni. Meloni has overseen a 60 per cent drop in illegal migration across the Mediterranean Sea in the past year — and Starmer is apparently interested. Find further details here.

The Italian prime minister signed a deal with Albania last year to send some asylum-seekers to the Balkan country and process the asylum requests there. Asked whether he would consider a similar agreement, Starmer said over the weekend: “Let’s see. It’s early days, I’m interested in how that works, I think everybody else is.”

Cooper defended Labour’s bid to learn from Meloni, who was elected Italian PM on a populist, right-wing platform, across the media studios this morning. She insisted government has a “moral imperative” to stop the boats. Full quotes here.

But today: some reflections on the state of the Conservative leadership race, and one candidate’s plan to combat a cruel “perception” problem.

James Cleverly’s case to the Conservative Party

James Cleverly wants his fellow Conservatives to appear less “moany”. The shadow home secretary, the most experienced ex-minister left in contention, has argued his party suffers from a pernicious “perception” problem — one that a future leader must tackle if the Tories are to reclaim power in the near term.

Outlining his thesis on an episode of the Political Thinking podcast, hosted by the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Cleverly contended that his party is seen as overly “angry” and “negative”.

To return to government, Cleverly continued, Conservatives must challenge this “artificial perception”.

“I want to break this artificial perception that being Conservative means you are angry or negative or moany or grumpy”, he declared. “Because it just turns people off. It is running contrary to the mood of a lot of people that we need to win over, particularly younger voters.”

Cleverly is one of the four remaining candidates competing to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader, and has therefore won the right to make his case to the party’s annual conference later this month. He is however, the only contender to explicitly locate this “perception” issue and call for a symbolic change of political style, alongside a broader reevaluation of policy substance.

The central implication of Cleverly’s comments is that the road to recovery does not run through a combative or muscular mode of conservatism — what the party faithful might view as ideologically pious, but others see as irrelevant and performative. The former foreign secretary doesn’t just want his party to pick its battles better, but to fight those battles more constructively.

Interestingly, the shadow home secretary’s pitch reflects Keir Starmer’s pledge, repeated throughout the election campaign, to pursue a politics “which treads a little lighter on all our lives”. As I have argued before, the promise successfully capitalised on the public’s collective fatigue of Johnsonian scandal, Trussite chaos and Sunakian performance.

Cleverly, therefore, wants both to neutralise this potent Labour attack line and, in doing so, draw some dividing lines between himself and other leadership rivals.

The immediate challenge for Cleverly at this stage in the leadership contest, as with other contenders, is to emerge as one of the final two to face a wider ballot of the Tory membership. In this way, the shadow home secretary’s pathway is pretty simple: he needs to leapfrog one of the two race frontrunners, either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick.

Of these two candidates, Badenoch would seem the most vulnerable — having come second to Jenrick in both MP voting rounds so far, recording deficits of six and five MPs respectively. As such, with Jenrick a likely shoo-in for the final stage of the contest, it makes sense that Cleverly is now subtly jibing Badenoch over her notorious pugnaciousness.

As I have observed before, the shadow housing secretary’s firebrand demeanour is both her most obvious strength — and her greatest weakness. Badenoch’s appeal in the Conservative Party is to those who desire not merely election victory, fleeting as that can prove, but advances in the wider “culture war”. For those who see and practice politics as a war of attrition, Badenoch — the candidate who can best take chunks out of Starmer — is the chosen one.

Cleverly, meanwhile, is keen to reframe the Conservative leadership race as a conversation about trust, competence and experience. In the end, choosing the most overtly oppositional candidate could prove a strong recipe for perennial opposition — but not power.

It will be interesting to see whether Cleverly expands on his argument about the Conservative Party’s “perception” at its annual conference, beginning 29th September. His success, in the end, may well rely on MPs and members being ready to hear it.

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