❓WHAT HAPPENED: Sir James Cleverly has been returned to Britain’s Shadow Cabinet by the Conservative (Tory) Party.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Sir James Cleverly, the Conservative Party, and the Trump administration.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Britain, July 2025.
💬KEY QUOTE: “Dear Republican colleagues, please, please, please don’t choose Donald Trump as the front man for American Right-of-Centre politics. Please.” – James Cleverly in 2015.
🎯IMPACT: The move may further strain relations between the Conservative Party and President Donald J. Trump, who previously lamented that the party had gone “far left” in office.
Britain’s notionally center-right Conservative (Tory) Party has returned Sir James Cleverly, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Braintree, to the Shadow Cabinet. The move may further sour relations between the Conservatives, who governed Britain from 2010 to mid-2024, and the Trump administration, with Cleverly having a long history of criticizing President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Cleverly publicly begged Republicans not to nominate Trump as their candidate in 2015, writing on Twitter (now X), “Dear Republican colleagues, please, please, please don’t choose Donald Trump as the front man for American Right-of-Centre politics. Please.”
Following the America First leader’s election in 2016 and inauguration in 2017, Cleverly railed that “President Trump‘s immigration and Syrian refugee ban is indefensible, unworkable and almost certainly unconstitutional.” Conversely, he gushed over how much he enjoyed meeting former President Joe Biden in 2024, describing the Democrat as “a great friend to the UK” despite his barely concealed loathing for the British and especially the English.
More recently, Clevery has criticized Trump and Vance for their pro-peace foreign policy, particularly with respect to Ukraine. In March, he misinterpreted remarks by Vance that European troops “from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” could not offer better security guarantees to Ukraine than the U.S. as referring to Britain, saying the Vice President was being “foolish and insulting.”
Despite his party’s name, Cleverly’s ideology leans more towards extreme liberalism rather than conservatism. For instance, he has written that he looks forward to a future of “free market labor movements”—i.e. open borders for foreign workers—and he subscribes to the woke-left view that “Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV.”
The son of an immigrant from Sierra Leone, Cleverley insists that Britain’s social cohesion and sense of identity “is not being watered down by immigration,” arguing that anyone who says otherwise is “extremist and racist.”
“We have managed to stay British through immigration from the Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, Irish, West Indians, West Africans, East Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, etc., etc., etc. Britishness evolved, but it did not diminish,” he claimed.
Nigeria-raised Conservative Party leader Olukemi “Kemi” Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch has previously described herself as a “first-generation immigrant,” although she was born in London. The party is rapidly declining in popularity under her leadership, with Nigel Farage’s populist Reform Party set to supplant it on the British right.
Picture by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street.
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