Badenoch vows ‘mission of renewal' as Cleverly returns in Tory reshuffle
The former foreign secretary will shadow Angela Rayner in the housing, communities and local government brief, while ex-Conservative Party chairman Richard Holden becomes shadow transport secretary.
Sir James served in the Foreign Office and as home secretary when the Conservatives were in power before spending months on the back benches after coming third in the Tory leadership contest last year.
The MP for Braintree in Essex has since used his influential position as a former minister to warn against pursuing a populist agenda akin to Nigel Farage's Reform UK.
He has also urged the Conservatives to reject climate change 'luddites' on the right who believe 'the way things are now is just fine,' in a speech widely seen as at odds with the net zero stance of the Tory leader.
His frontbench comeback is among a series of appointments made by Mrs Badenoch on Tuesday, also including Kevin Hollinrake as party chairman, replacing Nigel Huddleston, who will become shadow culture secretary.
Stuart Andrew will become shadow health secretary, replacing Edward Argar, who resigned citing health reasons.
Julia Lopez has been appointed shadow science secretary, taking over from Alan Mak, who has left the shadow cabinet.
Gareth Bacon has been replaced by Mr Holden in his transport brief and demoted from the shadow cabinet, but remains minister for London.
As he prepares for his last parliamentary oral questions from the front bench, I want to put on record my sincere thanks to Ed Argar for serving in my Shadow Cabinet.
I wish him the very best for a speedy recovery and return to full health, and so I will be making a few changes… pic.twitter.com/FWoC7L19nd
— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) July 22, 2025
Mrs Badenoch said: 'The Conservative Party's mission of renewal continues, and these changes demonstrate exactly that.
'This new frontbench team reflects the rich experience within the party – from the tenacious campaigners fighting for Britain, to the experienced MPs who will keep holding this disastrous Labour Government to account.
'Unlike Labour and Reform, the Conservative Party is unashamedly on the side of Britain's makers: the people that work hard, do the right thing and want to get on in life.'
The reshuffle confirms former leadership contender Robert Jenrick will remain in the shadow cabinet following questions about whether Mrs Badenoch would choose to keep him in his current post.
The former leadership contender has strayed well beyond his justice brief, building a prominent social media presence with campaigns on a range of issues from tackling fare dodgers on the London Underground to the impact of immigration on housing.
Labour Party chairwoman Ellie Reeves said: 'No amount of deckchair shuffling can hide that the architects of 14 years of Tory failure still sit around Kemi Badenoch's top table.
'The Conservatives haven't changed and they haven't once apologised for the mess they left behind.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
30 minutes ago
- The Sun
It's easy to sneer at Corbyn after farcical launch of his new party but here's why Starmer should be very, very afraid
IT is easy to sneer at Jeremy Corbyn and his new political party. As Labour leader Corbyn took his former comrades to their biggest defeat since 1935, winning just 203 seats. 2 2 As leader of a fringe party he will have zero chance of becoming Prime Minister. We can all be thankful for that. The launch of the party was itself farcical, with Corbyn already apparently falling out with his co-founder, former Labour MP Zarah Sultana. It appears to be called 'Your Party', and even has a website by that name, yet within hours of the launch Sultana tweeted in protest 'it's not called that!' and insisted that a name will be chosen at the putative party's first conference. When challenged on the row, Corbyn announced that Sultana was 'in Coventry' (where her constituency is), failing to spot the euphemism. All very Corbyn-like. If I were Keir Starmer, however, I would be taking the launch of the new party very seriously indeed. While Your Party, or whatever it is called, has no chance of forming a government, it has every chance of contributing to the downfall of the current one. Just look how Reform UK ate into the Conservative Party vote in last year's General Election, helping reduce it to a rump of just 120 seats. Corbyn has every chance of inflicting as much damage on Labour as Reform UK did on the Tories. Add to Labour's misery Corbyn and Sultana haven't announced much in the way of policy yet — you wouldn't expect them to have done — but their declaration on Thursday included two positions which absolutely hit the right buttons for Labour's increasingly disenchanted band of supporters on the Left. First, they want to end arms sales to Israel, and second, they propose to take all utility companies into public ownership. Inside UK's 1st Reform pub with £2 pints, boozers drinking 'Remainer tears' & even Corbyn's allowed in, on one condition As for the first, just look how Labour suffered at the hands of independent pro-Palestinian candidates in the last election, with Jonathan Ashworth losing his supposedly safe seat in Leicester and Wes Streeting, now Health Secretary, scraping home by just 528 votes in Ilford North. Shabana Mahmood, now Justice Secretary, saw her 28,000 majority shrink to just 3,421 in the face of a challenge from a pro-Palestine candidate — and that was against the backdrop of a national Labour landslide. A nationally organised General Election campaign which focuses on Gaza — even one organised by Corbyn — can surely only add to Labour's misery on this front. Whatever the rest of us might think of Hamas, and worry that a Palestinian state — if created now — would simply become a terrorist state, this is a touchstone issue on the Left and has the potential to cost the party a substantial number of seats. As for nationalising public utilities, that would be hugely popular among voters — and not just Labour ones. According to a recent YouGov poll, the public favours public ownership of energy companies by a margin of 71 per cent to 17 per cent and of water companies by 82 to eight per cent. Where Corbyn would find the money to renationalise utility companies is, of course, another matter, but my guess is that many voters will not be bothered by that little problem. At the next election, Starmer will in one sense be in an even worse position than Rishi Sunak was in last year. Starmer will have two upstart parties chipping away at his vote. While Corbyn's party will be attracting votes on the Left, Reform UK has already started eating into the traditional working class Labour vote as Nigel Farage adopts an agenda that is more economically left-wing. To add to this, Labour holds a very large number of seats on small majorities. It won a landslide only because its unimpressive 34 per cent share of the vote was very efficiently spread. It won't take much for Labour's majority to evaporate. Not for the first time, you have to wonder at Starmer's political naivety in chucking Corbyn out of the Labour Party. It may have seemed a good wheeze at the time, five years ago, to make a statement that Labour really had changed. There was also a good reason for it in Corbyn's claim that accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party had been 'massively overstated for political reasons'. But Corbyn had been saying ridiculous things for decades and had never been thrown out by Labour. Vanished without trace Tony Blair correctly worked out that Corbyn had a huge following on the Left and it was best to tolerate his presence. Starmer seems to have a poor political brain by comparison. Mastering a political start-up is notoriously difficult in Britain's first-past-the-post election system. Who now remembers ChangeUK, the anti- Brexit party which was launched with eight MPs who had defected from their parties but which quickly vanished without trace? Even Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams' SDP only lasted eight years in spite of some impressive early by-election wins. But Starmer should remember how the SDP nevertheless helped keep Labour a long way from power during the 1980s. His fate may just have been sealed.
Times
32 minutes ago
- Times
James Cleverly: I like Farage but Reform are a one-man band
Where many Tories view Nigel Farage as a menacing bogeyman, Sir James Cleverly is prepared to admit that he likes him. 'I've met him a couple of times,' Cleverly says. 'He's fun, he's funny, he's interesting. He's a very, very good communicator. He's very good at holding fort. He's a very clubbable person.' But for Cleverly, a Tory big beast who this week returned to the shadow cabinet, Farage has an inherent limitation: there is only one of him. 'The challenge he's got is that he's the only one in his party that you can describe in those terms,' Cleverly says. 'It's fine for what they've been doing at the moment, which is having him as the lead singer and everyone else if basically the backing band. But if you're going to be taken seriously as a party of government, that's nowhere near enough. As much as he's smart and funny and talented, he's not omnipresent.' • Shadow cabinet reshuffle: Badenoch returns Cleverly to Tory front bench Who, Cleverly rhetorically asks, are Farage's shadow chancellor, shadow home secretary and shadow defence secretary? 'The fact is he hasn't got any of them. That's nowhere near good enough to be taken seriously as an alternative party of government. The British people deserve better. He's their biggest advantage and their biggest disadvantage.' Farage 'crumbles' when pushed for details, Cleverly adds. 'We're now seeing that as soon as he's asked even for an order of magnitude explanation to the cost of some of his ideas he totally falls apart. When he's trying to outbid Labour on welfare spending, when you talk to him about how he's going to do that whilst also cutting taxes, he falls apart.' Cleverly was the big name in Kemi Badenoch's mini-reshuffle this week. Last October he dropped out of the Tory leadership contest after being bested by a margin of only four votes, going from runaway favourite to also-ran in an instant. Some of his supporters later admitted that they were so confident Cleverly would make it to the final pairing that they backed one of his rivals, a move designed to improve his chances of winning the overall contest. That turned out to be a catastrophic error. Cleverly decided to take a break. 'I'd come off the back of being foreign secretary, home secretary,' he says. 'During much of the previous couple of years Susie [his wife] was going through her cancer treatment, which actually impacted me more than I realised at the time. Then we went into an incredibly bruising general election campaign and instead of taking a breather over the summer I threw myself into a leadership campaign. At this point I realised that I did actually need a bit of time, a bit more time with Susie, a bit of time with the family.' Did he enjoy his time off? In fact it was a 'pretty turbulent' period, Cleverly says. At the beginning of the year one of his closest friends from his army days died after developing oesophageal cancer. 'In the early part of the new year I was with him when he died,' Cleverly says. 'The weekend after, my brother-in-law — Susie's younger brother — had a catastrophic heart attack and he died. And then, just over a week ago, my father died. So the first half of this year has been pretty full on.' When Cleverly was approached by the Conservatives' chief whip last week, he decided it was time for a return. He is now shadowing Angela Rayner's community and housing brief. 'I genuinely thought Labour would mess up,' he says. 'But they were messing up at such a rate [it] meant we had to get back on the front foot more quickly than perhaps anyone had envisaged. We didn't have the time in opposition to build up slowly and gently.' It does not look good for the Tories. Under Badenoch they have gone backwards in the polls and there have been complaints in the shadow cabinet about her leadership and her strategy. Some shadow ministers think she will be ousted after November, when the one-year protection period shielding her from a leadership challenge expires. 'Let's not do the whole kind of, 'Throw a leader under the bus and see if it works this time',' Cleverly says. 'It hasn't worked the last three or four times we've done it. My strong advice is [that] our effort, our time, our energy, our focus, is much, much better directed at making sure Kemi succeeds as leader. Kemi won fair and square. She's got strong ideas, she is a staunch Conservative.' • Emma Duncan: James Cleverly's homecoming is smart move for Tories Some of the attacks on Badenoch have been vituperative. The New Statesman reported that some Tories believe she is pulling her punches on illegal migration because she is an 'anchor baby', a term used in the United States to refer to people who ensure their children are born in a country in order to gain residency. Badenoch has said she was born in the UK because her mother, who is from Nigeria, came to get medical care at a private hospital. 'The idea of living in the UK and moving to the UK was not something that was at the forefront,' she has said. Cleverly says the attacks originate on the left and highlights the abuse he has suffered because his mother came to Britain from Sierra Leone. 'There's a particularly pernicious type of left-wing racism which rears its ugly head surprisingly regularly,' he says. 'This is one of the things I find really, really, really unpalatable. I had this when I was home secretary, when I was tough on migration. And people said, 'You're such a hypocrite to try to crack down on small boats because your mum was an immigrant'. 'Which implied that in the eyes of some people all immigrants are the same. That somehow my mum … playing by the rules, filling in the forms, joining the queue and spending a whole working life in the NHS, that somehow she is the same as someone that's paid a criminal to get here on a small boat. That I find incredibly distasteful. 'And sadly, it's unsurprising that Kemi is having these kind of accusations flung at her. I know she has got a bit of an armoured hide when it comes to this kind of comment, so I can't imagine she's staying awake over comments like that.' The Tories, he says, are still experiencing the wrath of voters after their 'comprehensive' defeat at the general election. 'You talk to voters [and] last year's general election feels a heartbeat away. They are still angry with us about the things they were angry with us about at the general election. There is a residual frustration with us and a newfound frustration with the Labour Party.' Cleverly's critics often call him a centrist. They point to his position on the European Court of Human Rights — he has repeatedly said it is no 'silver bullet' — and his criticism of the 'neo-Luddites' on the right opposed to green technology and who think that climate change campaigners are 'scaremongering'. Cleverly says those critics are wrong and describes himself as a 'Thatcherite Reaganite'. His leadership platform included a 'really significant reduction in welfare spending' and committing the party to spending 3 per cent on defence in government. Badenoch has committed to scrapping the net zero 2050 target, a position Cleverly agrees with. 'When we, as a party, were making that commitment on that timescale, it was prior to Russia's invasion [of] Ukraine, prior to much of the current conflict in the Middle East,' he says. 'The timetables that we set out before those major events are no longer tenable. 'We shouldn't be capping wells in the North Sea. We shouldn't be putting lead in our own saddles when it comes to competing on a global market. We shouldn't be throwing heavy industry under a bus. But while making sure we protect ourselves here, we should still be looking to take full advantage of the direction of travel in green technologies and energy technologies.' Badenoch is widely expected to announce at the autumn's party conference that she is committing the party to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). She has commissioned a review by Lord Wolfson, the shadow attorney-general, to look at the issue in the meantime. Will Cleverly back leaving the ECHR? 'The lesson we learnt from Brexit is if you want to make a big change like that, you have to have a delivery plan,' he says. 'Boring as this may sound, I'm actually going to wait for this incredibly smart and thoughtful person to do the analysis before I make a final judgment.' He is concerned about 'judicial activism', however. 'There are tensions that are being stoked because of perverse decisions by the immigration tribunal, through the judicial review process. What message does that send to people that have actually done the right thing and voted?' Cleverly says he feels sympathy for those protesting peacefully outside migrant hotels. 'I understand why they're so very, very angry,' he says. 'I understand why they look to the government that made a whole load of bold promises, who thought it was all going to be so terribly easy, and have let those communities down. Where I absolutely do not have any sympathy is for people who travel across the country to try to turn peaceful community protests into a violent, clickbait protest. Hijacking community concerns is something that should be responded to forcefully by the courts, by the police.' Surely the Conservatives were part of the problem? The failure to stop small boats crossing the Channel led to tens of thousands of people being housed in asylum hotels. 'I completely recognise that this very visible and very alarming spike in illegal migration … shot up while we were in government,' he says. 'The focus we had on this was relentless. We were willing to try a whole range of things. And that's in part where the Rwanda plan came from, looking at doing things really fundamentally different, as well as beefing up the National Crime Agency's work in Europe, disrupting criminal gangs, arresting people, deporting people.' • Badenoch says she would copy drastic cuts of Argentina's president Labour, he says, showed an 'appalling lack of planning and foresight' and its decision to cancel the plan to sent migrants to Rwanda was 'absolutely toxic'. On housing, Cleverly says he wants to make it easier to 'go up a little bit' by building new levels on existing buildings, as well as ensuring there is 'greater density' in cities with good-quality housing. He also could look at property taxes to help people get on the ladder. His overall message is that the Tories do not need to 'reinvent the wheel'. 'What we need to do is update the way we present that to a new generation of voters,' he says. 'But conservative principles are sound and we don't need to drift away from those conservative principles. And that's the reason we've been such a successful political party.' However, the Tories cannot afford to be passive and must go after the voters who have defected to other parties. 'We can't just rely on them to come back, we've got to go and get them,' he says. 'We need to be hunters, not farmers. We need to make the case. People voted for other political parties for a reason. And we need to go get them back.' Kemi Badenoch of Robert Jenrick? Kemi. We have got to give her a chance. Nigel Farage or Keir Starmer? Neither. They can go in a room together and talk about their ineptitude. British & Irish Lions or the English cricket team? Lions. I'm a rugby player. Opposition or government? Government. David Cameron always said a day in government is better than a year in opposition.
The Herald Scotland
43 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
PM signals UK will help Gaza aid airdrop amid calls for Palestinian statehood
The Prime Minister said the UK will 'do everything we can to get aid in via this route'. Sir Keir meanwhile faces growing calls to recognise a Palestinian state immediately, amid mounting global anger over the starving population in Gaza. Some 221 MPs from Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Greens, Plaid Cymru, SDLP and independents, have signed a letter calling on the Government to take the step at a UN meeting next week. France's president Emmanuel Macron announced his nation would formally recognise Palestine at the UN General Assembly in September, leading UK politicians to question whether the British Government would follow suit. US President Donald Trump suggested Mr Macron's announcement 'doesn't matter' as he left America for a visit to Scotland. US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before departing on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington (Alex Brandon/AP) But Sarah Champion, the senior Labour MP who organised the letter by parliamentarians, said recognition 'would send a powerful symbolic message that we support the rights of the Palestinian people'. Other senior Commons figures who signed the letter include Labour select committee chairs Liam Byrne, Dame Emily Thornberry and Ruth Cadbury. Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, as well as Tory former minister Kit Malthouse, and Sir Edward Leigh – Parliament's longest-serving MP – also signed it. The majority of those who have signed, 131, are Labour MPs. In a video statement released on Friday, Sir Keir made plain his desire for a ceasefire in the war. He said: 'I know the British people are sickened by what is happening. The images of starvation and desperation are utterly horrifying. 'The denial of aid to children and babies is completely unjustifiable, just as the continued captivity of hostages is completely unjustifiable.' The appalling scenes in Gaza are unrelenting. The UK will pull every lever we have to get food and lifesaving support to Palestinians, and we will evacuate children who need urgent medical assistance. This humanitarian catastrophe must end. — Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) July 25, 2025 Signalling the UK is willing to help get aid into Gaza via air, the Prime Minister added: 'News that Israel will allow countries to airdrop aid into Gaza has come far too late, but we will do everything we can to get aid in via this route. 'We are already working urgently with the Jordanian authorities to get British aid on to planes and into Gaza.' Children who need specialist medical treatment will be evacuated from Gaza to the UK, Sir Keir added. The Prime Minister also called for an international coalition to 'end the suffering' in Gaza, similar to the coalition of the willing aimed at helping Ukraine. Sir Keir had earlier responded to calls for the recognition of a Palestinian state, insisting such a move needed to be part of the 'pathway' to peace in the Middle East, which he and allies are working towards. He added: 'Recognition of a Palestinian state has to be one of those steps. I am unequivocal about that. But it must be part of a wider plan which ultimately results in a two-state solution and lasting security for Palestinians and Israelis.' In a statement released on Friday alongside the leaders of France and Germany, the Prime Minister urged Israel to stop restricting the flow of aid into Gaza. French President Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (Kin Cheung/PA) Charities operating in Gaza have said Israel's blockade and ongoing military offensive are pushing people there towards starvation, warning that they are seeing their own workers and Palestinians 'waste away'. The Prime Minister will meet the US president during his trip to Scotland, where he arrived on Friday evening. US-led peace talks in Qatar were cut short on Thursday, with Washington's special envoy Steve Witkoff accusing Hamas of a 'lack of desire to reach a ceasefire'. The deal under discussion is expected to include a 60-day ceasefire in which Hamas would release 10 living hostages and the remains of 18 others in phases in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. Aid supplies would be ramped up and the two sides would hold negotiations on a lasting truce.
