The 53-year-old was an early supporter of Liz Truss ahead of the first vote, and during the campaign was happy to criticize her defeated rival Rishi Sunak for being slow to respond to concerns about Chinese influence. At one point the former chancellor proposed banning China’s 30 Confucius Institutes in Britain. While Truss has not made a similar commitment, Cleverly argued that Truss had focused on Beijing “for quite some time” and that “we have to look at China’s influence, not just on the world stage, but here in the UK”. Other senior Tory hopefuls to become foreign secretary suggest, privately, that Cleverley’s appointment “is designed so that Liz can remain foreign secretary while she is in No 10”, arguing that the new prime minister wants to keep the download decisions for herself. However, the requirement to spend days and weeks on the road requires a certain degree of trust from the occupant of Downing Street. Cleverly, he spent almost a year working directly for the new prime minister and his home in Blackheath in south-east London is a mile down the road from where Truss lived in Greenwich. It is a part of London with which the politician was associated throughout his life. Clever, whose mother came to the UK from Sierra Leone and his father’s family is from Wiltshire, grew up in a one-bedroom flat in nearby Hither Green as an only child, partly because his parents could not afford possibility to grow more. . Although he wasn’t rich – his mother was a nurse, his father a surveyor – they paid for Clever to go to Golf’s school, where tuition fees can reach £18,300 a year. From there he joined the army. An early injury deprived him of a full-time military career, although he remains a member of the Territorial Army Reserve. Instead, he studied at the University of west London, where he met his wife, Susannah, and began a career in publishing before drifting into Conservative politics around 2002. One of his first acts was to write a report on how the party could to do more won over black voters and “very quickly found himself in Iain Duncan Smith’s office” when he was party leader. It helped put him on the Conservative map and won the London Assembly seat of Bexley and Bromley in 2008 as Boris Johnson became mayor. Cleverly, he served as chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority and presided over the closure of 10 fire stations – a decision forced upon him, he said, because of budget cuts. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Moving upwards, Smart entered the Commons in 2015 as MP for Braintree in Essex and has sought to cultivate a plain-speaking reputation. He described Theresa May’s disastrous 2017 election campaign as “hopeless” and briefly tried to shore up the leadership after she resigned but failed to attract enough support. At one point he apologized to singer Lily Allen after mistakenly accusing former transport secretary Chris Grayling of being at the lunch when Monarch airlines caved. However, he was criticized for claiming that 19th-century anti-slavery MP William Wilberforce was a Tory when he was an independent. Johnson became leader of rival party Cleverly in July 2019, although his successful election campaign was largely led by Dominic Cummings, and was relegated in the post-election reshuffle in February 2020 to the Foreign Office role, from which he was able to record a rapid political rise.
