James Cleverly: What £2m Will Really Get You in London
(Louise Haywood-Schiefer)
11 min read
Shadow housing secretary James Cleverly speaks to Noah Vickers about Keir Starmer’s ‘blatant’ misogyny, scrapping Labour’s mansion tax, and considering a run for London mayor
James Cleverly is running late, his team apologise, as he’s been detained in the Chamber listening to the Prime Minister’s statement on the Middle East.
But The House is not complaining. It means a few minutes to snoop around his Portcullis House office, albeit under the watchful eye of a staffer.
One wall is decorated with photos of Cleverly and his comrades in the Territorial Army, with a large Union Flag hanging next to them. So far, so Conservative.
But the room is also a bit of a mancave. The shelf above his desk is lined with figurines from his favourite films: Vito Corleone, The Godfather himself, stands a little incongruously next to Chewbacca from Star Wars. They’re joined by a posse of Lego medieval knights, and on the wall opposite, a pack of the Warhammer figures which the 56-year-old MP for Braintree enjoys painting in his spare time.
Someone has also gifted him a mug emblazoned with the words ‘Deeply Concerned’. The phrase was one of Cleverly’s pet hates at the Foreign Office, so much so that he banned officials from using it. Instead of saying what the UK is feeling, they should say what the UK is doing, he argued.
And next to all these objects, still proudly on show, is a baseball cap from Cleverly’s failed bid for the Conservative leadership in 2024.
“I’m glad I did it. I absolutely don’t regret doing it,” he tells The House. “We are, all of us in politics, competitive people, so you put yourself forward for a race and, whatever kind it is, you want to win it.”
Cleverly’s sales pitch in that contest was that he had the most experience in government of any of the candidates. “I didn’t think any of the others would be able to hit the ground running as quickly as I could,” he says.
“As Kemi has found her feet – and I’ll be honest with you, she has not found her feet instantly, but more quickly than I was expecting – as she has now really got into her stride, we’ve seen her get a cut-through which I’m picking up on the doorsteps…
“People believe she knows what she wants, and she’s not afraid to say what she believes – and in the era of authenticity politics, that is really important.”
Kemi... has not found her feet instantly, but more quickly than I was expecting
Kemi Badenoch’s personal approval rating has indeed risen from where it was for much of last year, and several polls place her above all the other party leaders – albeit still with an overall negative rating. Voting intention for the Conservatives if an election were held tomorrow, however, is still south of 20 per cent.
“I think one of the interesting things about contemporary politics is everybody seems to want everything immediately,” says Cleverly. “And in the real world – not just in politics – anything valuable takes a bit of time.
“We don’t have a ton of time, but she’s moving quickly. We can see that the other political parties are nervous. Keir Starmer does not know how to deal with her, and his particular brand of misogynistic, condescending sneering is going down very badly.”
He chortles when asked whether he is really accusing Starmer of misogyny, as if the evidence could not be more obvious.
“I can see, sitting on the frontbench, what he can’t see, which is the awkward faces that his backbenchers pull, when he goes on these very nasty, very personal attacks.
“It really is quite telling… When he criticises Farage, he goes after him, but there’s a condescension in the way that he deals not just with Kemi but a number of female politicians.”
He adds: “This is not an area that I would pretend to normally notice, but it is so blatant, and it is playing badly with his own backbenchers.”
(Readers may recall that Cleverly was once accused of misogyny himself after joking at a Downing Street reception about spiking his wife’s drink with Rohypnol. He subsequently apologised.)
The former foreign secretary is equally unimpressed by Starmer’s performance internationally, including how he has dealt with Donald Trump and Iran.
“He was sycophantic not that long ago to President Trump, presenting the invite [for the state visit].” Cleverly puts on a baby voice and waves his hand in the air in imitation of the PM: “‘Look what I got from the King, oh please, be my best friend!’
“It was nauseating. Whereas now, because he thinks the public mood has shifted, now he’s very critical. He’s trying to make out as if he’s the beacon of integrity.”
The result is that the US government sees “someone they don’t really think they can rely upon, because they don’t really know where he stands”, Cleverly claims.
The PM should have the courage to say, he argues, that Trump’s blockade in the Strait of Hormuz is wrong, as it breaches the internationally agreed principle of freedom of navigation – rather than simply emphasising that the UK will not be part of it.
“The UN agency that monitors seas and shipping is the only UN agency based in the UK, so we should take freedom of navigation seriously,” he says. “Things that we criticise, for example, in the Black Sea, when it comes to grain and fuel exports from Ukraine, we should be comfortable having a consistent approach. But Starmer can’t even do that.”
Away from his old brief, Cleverly has had plenty to sink his teeth into in his current role as shadow housing secretary. He warns that the government’s plan to introduce a ‘mansion tax’ on all properties worth over £2m will have a disproportionate impact on Londoners.
“The use of language is completely inappropriate. They use the word ‘mansion’ tax – I completely reject that,” he says.
“In south-east London – which is the area that I was born and brought up in – £2m will buy you a nice, four-bedroom, maybe detached but quite possibly semi-detached house, in one of the cheaper quadrants of London.
“It will get you almost nothing in west London, almost nothing in south-west London, almost nothing in north London.”
Penalising families for living in “nice, but not enormous” properties that have surpassed £2m in value “because of property prices beyond their control” is “pernicious”, he argues.
“The nasty, rather cynical use of language, implying that it will always be ‘somebody else’ – that’s always the big thing with Labour, the implication that ‘somebody else’ will pay this tax.
“The simple reality is hard-working families, doing the right thing, are more often than not the ones dragged into these tax bands – but of course, not if you’re on benefits. There are people on benefits in properties of that value and, once again, they will have a carve-out, and the people working hard will be the ones who bear the brunt.”
He confirms the Conservatives will ditch the tax but, on other aspects of housing policy, he is less willing to make precise commitments about what changes a Tory government would make.
I’m not in the mood for being distracted by very flattering speculation about what I might do next
The Renters’ Rights Act, Cleverly warns, is already reducing the number of available rental properties across the country. Ahead of the reforms taking effect in May, the MP is himself being forced out of the home he rents in his constituency, as PoliticsHome recently revealed. He says the legislation will fail to deal with rogue landlords, while driving “good landlords” like his out of the market, though he does not say which specific elements of the legislation he would repeal.
He argues, however, that the legislation’s abolition of fixed-term tenancies, replacing them with ‘rolling’ agreements, is the wrong approach. Tenancy agreements, he points out, are contracts freely entered into by both parties.
“It’s not unreasonable that at the end of that contract, you can either revisit the contract, sign a new contract, or say, ‘Look, this is great, but the contract’s now finished and I want to do something else’.
“The idea that the contract has now got this one-way valve, whereby the tenant can say ‘I want to keep doing this’, even if the landlord says that they don’t, is a fundamental unbalancing of the relationship.”
Nor does he clarify exactly how the Tories would handle the delivery of any New Towns they may inherit from the current government, saying it is “not my job to do Labour Party policy but better – it’s my job to think about Conservative Party policy”. A key focus though will be to “make it much quicker, easier, cheaper, to build on previously developed land” rather than farmland or other greenfield sites.
When it comes to the thorny question of how local government should be funded, Cleverly shows little appetite for fundamental reform – or even to carry out a revaluation of properties which are still charged according to 1991 prices.
“What I’m not going to do is make any kind of broad-brush, sweeping statements about rebuilding local government finance,” he says, “but we do want to bring the costs down, we want to focus on what really matters to the people who pay the bills.”
Cleverly cut his teeth in politics as a campaigner in London. Elected to the London Assembly in 2008, he was soon asked to be then-mayor Boris Johnson’s ‘youth ambassador’ at the tender age of 39.
Since his election as an Essex MP in 2015, however, Cleverly’s attention has never drifted far from London politics. Even places as distant from the capital’s boundary as Braintree, he says, are “massively impacted” by decisions made in City Hall.
“When London loses control of the streets, it’s Essex coppers who are sent to reinforce London during these pro-Palestinian, hateful marches that we see.
“When crime spills over from London, it impacts Essex. When the transport network grinds to halt because of strike action, I have commuters in Braintree that are really screwed over.”
Borough elections on 7 May will be an important stepping stone, he suggests, in the Tories’ attempt to win back the capital’s mayoralty in 2028.
“We need to show that we take it seriously, that we can come up with real solutions for the problems that Londoners face – and that starts with doing well in these local government elections.”
Labour mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has not yet confirmed whether he will stand for a fourth term in office, but Cleverly seems to think he is more vulnerable to defeat than before.
“He’s always done this wonderful smoke and mirrors exercise, by basically saying, ‘Oh, it’s the Conservatives at Westminster that won’t let me do it.’ That excuse has now gone and what have people seen?
“Housing starts in London: collapsed. Crime: running rampant. Failure to recruit police officers. Failure to stand up to the transport unions. Failure, failure, failure. And this time, unlike the previous occasions, he’s got no one else to blame.”
It has all the trappings of an election attack ad. Cleverly said last year he would be “stupid not to think about” running for mayor himself – but the election is now only two years away. So, is he thinking about it?
“Of course I think about it,” he says. “The more you get involved with local government-related stuff, the more you get involved with housing, the more Labour’s failures at a national level and in London are right in my face. So, of course, but look…”
He hesitates here, perhaps worried about sounding too tempted by the prospect of leaving Westminster.
“This has been my position right across the board: do the jobs that need to be done in the order that they need to be done. At the moment, our first job, my job, working with Kemi as party leader, Kevin [Hollinrake] as party chairman, our local government leaders, is to make sure we do as well as possible at these local government elections.
“That’s the immediate job, and I’m not in the mood for being distracted by very flattering speculation about what I might do next.”
He makes clear, however, that he is ruling nothing out: “I’m not going to do the kind of like ‘never, never, never’… I love being the MP for Braintree, I love my part of Essex, I love being an MP and it would be a pretty high bar for me to think about doing anything else.”
