Sir James Cleverly: London needs its mojo back
Council takeovers in Westminster and Wandsworth have offered the Tories a new confidence boost in London. Sir James Cleverly, once close to becoming party leader, speaks to Maurício Alencar about his ambition to lead the Conservatives into the next London mayoral election in 2028.
Unprompted, Sir James Cleverly insists it’s “nonsense” that London is a Labour city. “Complete nonsense”.
For months, it was speculated that he was eyeing a bid to stand for the Tories in the next mayoral election. Reform UK announced its candidate months ago, while the incumbent London mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, is yet to confirm whether he intends to go again or pass the baton on – perhaps to a senior Labour MP.
Cleverly wants to defy expectations. A city that is home to about nine million people – with different views, concerns and priorities – does not have the “same personality” or “same character”, Cleverly insists. All the naysayers against the Conservatives who predicted things would go disastrously in May’s local elections, he adds, have been “proven wrong”.
It has not been all plain sailing for the Tories in London in recent times.
The Conservatives were 11 percentage points behind Labour in the 2024 mayoral election. The party also controls just six London councils, compared with Labour’s nine. It also lost Havering in east London, which Reform swept. Havering is a “funny one” because of high-profile defections, Cleverly explained.
Nevertheless, Cleverly is buoyant about the public’s perception of the party after 14 years of Tory governments took a toll. He believes voters realise that Labour’s manifesto promises were “completely untrue” and that Kemi Badenoch is “saying really good stuff”.
The current MP for Braintree in Essex is not yet in full campaign mode. Reflections on the national mood suggest he has also not completely switched his political mindset to focus on London alone. He realises he has challengers to win the Tory selection for the London mayoral candidacy.
Festus Akinbusoye, a Westminster councillor, has also announced his intention to stand for the under a campaign to say “yes” to housing, infrastructure and development projects.
Cleverly coy on Khan
At first, Cleverly appeared to take a less pugnacious view of mayor Khan’s leadership than the likes of City Hall opposition leader Susan Hall or Reform UK’s candidate Laila Cunningham. Speaking from his parliamentary office in Westminster, he admitted it was “quite tempting to denounce him in the most strident terms possible”. Instead, Cleverly simply brands Khan a “disappointment”.
Khan inherited his mayoralty from Boris Johnson, who served for eight years.
The claims Khan makes on tackling violent crime, for example, don’t reflect how figures were already on a downward trajectory under Johnson, according to Cleverly. This comparison then led to praise of Johnson’s other policies as mayor – housebuilding, the cycle hire scheme (Boris bikes), electric buses and clean air targets.
Cleverly said he is prepared to defend former Prime Minister Johnson’s “golden legacy”.
After being asked whether Johnson may have under-delivered on ambitious projects, such as the plan to build a Garden Bridge between Blackfriars and Waterloo, Cleverly interrupts: “Oh, come on, come on. Look – hang on – sorry. We delivered, myself included, the most successful Olympic and Paralympic Games in modern history; delivered a new fleet of electric buses; got funding for Crossrail; got housebuilding going; reduced knife crime; got a cycle hire scheme; and got a whole cycle infrastructure… We got an awful lot done.”
…we got an awful lot done,” Cleverly said.
“I don’t know what people on Sadiq Khan’s team or Sadiq Khan himself would claim as his real delivery.”
It has become less common since the last General Election to hear a top Tory speak so positively about their record in government, or about London 2012. Cleverly’s reference to his experience as a London Assembly member may also underline his ambition to return to an era where the Tories benefitted from greater public trust.
He narrowly missed out on a head-to-head race to become Tory leader after the last election over suggestions that tactical voting in a preliminary round by his supporters backfired. Kemi Badenoch won the contest, and Robert Jenrick left for Reform.
Cleverly may still lay the path for his own political ambitions, but an early attack line against Khan suggested it doesn’t involve using the mayoralty as a “stepping stone” to become Prime Minister. He also accused Khan of failing “to do what Andy Burnham has ultimately done”.
The former home secretary and foreign secretary appeared keen to persuade voters that becoming mayor of London is an end goal in itself. His campaign will lead off his stated ambition to be “relentlessly focused on London, on the job in hand, rather than the future job”.
‘Getting our mojo back’
If Johnson got big infrastructure projects right, then would Cleverly go against the last Tory mayor by backing a runway expansion at Heathrow? His answer to questions about the top airport’s expansion, which Khan has also opposed, leaned far further towards a ‘yes’ rather than an outright ‘no’.
First, the expansion should not be a “debating point” by the next mayoral election, according to Cleverly, as costs have already run too high.
He then said London needs to be “better connected internationally” and he agreed it may well be true that Heathrow expansion makes the best economic case for that. Finally, he added the task of the mayor should be to find ways to ensure people in West London are “properly remediated” and see negative impacts mitigated.
The job facing the next mayor of London could be vastly different by 2028 if Andy Burnham’s devolution programme lives up to expectations.
A mayor with control over a larger share of locally generated income tax receipts could have far more freedom than their predecessor, particularly if a new formula for revenue distribution recognises that London is one of just two regions across the country to post a fiscal surplus.
Having served as the shadow local government secretary on Badenoch’s opposition frontbench, Cleverly has had a closer view of what devolution could involve than most Westminster politicians.
Yet he remains sceptical of plans Burnham and Chancellor John Healey plan to announce.
“If the central government is saying ‘you can have this money through this particular vehicle to spend it in a particular way’, that’s not really devolution,” he said.
“I should be allowed as Mayor to compete with the cities that London is competing with – Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Athens, Mumbai, Lagos… A lot of those places are actively wooing both businesses and individuals to leave London and relocate there. Burnham doesn’t get it. Burnham seems to think that there’s some competition between London and Manchester, for example. There isn’t. We’re on the same side.”
“Manchesterism will fall over if London isn’t allowed to shine.”
During the interview, Cleverly ruled out introducing an “overnight tourism levy,” even as greater powers are given to mayors. His economic message sticks to the party line on easing the tax burden for businesses and households. Even when asked about whether free travel benefits for over-60-year-olds are fair, he suggests he opposes the “tax-and-subsidise model”.
Young people who still feel “priced out” of London despite being in the upper tax bracket should be setting off “alarm bells” across the government, he added.
He wants the city to be “more competitive” – “getting our mojo back as a buzzing, happening, 24-hour, innovative, exciting, artistic city”. He believes those wins could come by taking a more incisive approach to governance, even as Khan has demanded the government give him greater powers.
Whereas Khan says AI could be a “weapon of mass destruction of jobs”, Cleverly says he wants the technology itself to “offset any disbenefits”. While the RMT have “played a blinder” by getting Khan’s administration to agree to contract terms after a series of strike threats, Cleverly says he will not show the “weakness to roll over and buckle under pressure”.
By the end of the interview, Cleverly has steadily changed tune on Khan. “It just feels like we’ve got a Mayor who’s faxing it in, waiting to take up his next gig at the United Nations (UN) or whatever it is he thinks he’s going to do next.”
Facing an as-yet-unknown Labour opponent and a noisy Reform insurgency will be tough for any Tory candidate in London, but Cleverly said he believes he has the experience to find a path through.