James Cleverly, the former home secretary, has said his erstwhile department’s pledge to “Stop the boats” was a political error.
Cleverly, who oversaw the government’s response to illegal immigration during his time at the Home Office, said the slogan reduced a “very complicated and challenging problem into a sound bite.”
He acknowledged that the phrase, which he repeated incessantly from November 2023 to July 2024, effectively imposed a yardstick whereby every “even one boat crossing” ensured the government’s response could be dismissed as a failure.
Speaking at a Conservative conference fringe event hosted by centre-right think tank Onward, Cleverly reflected regretfully that he had inherited the “Stop the boats” slogan after succeeding Suella Braverman as home secretary in late 2023.
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He added that the Home Office under his tenure as secretary of state failed to effectively communicate the “successes” achieved in illegal migration policy. As a result, he argued it was “unsurprisingly” that voters concluded the government had made no advances on illegal migration policy during Rishi Sunak’s premiership.
Cleverly is one of four remaining candidates making their pitches to party activists at the conference, alongside Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat.
Tory MPs will narrow the field to just two in further votes at Westminster on 9 and 10 October.
Former prime minister Rishi Sunak unveiled the “Stop the boats” slogan during his 2023 New Year’s speech as one of his “five pledges” for government. At the time, the PM pledged to “halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists and stop the boats.”
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As such, “Stop the boats” featured as number five among the government’s priorities and was initially the responsibility of then-home secretary Suella Braverman. Announcing the slogan in January 2023, Sunak said: “We will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed.”
In June 2024, weeks before the general election on 4 July, it was found that a record number of people seeking asylum in small boats had crossed the Channel in the first six months of the year. The provisional total for the year was recorded at 12,901.
Rising small boat crossings were seized upon by rival parties during the election, especially Reform UK and its leader Nigel Farage, as evidence the government has lost control of the asylum system.
Speaking on the Conservative conference fringe on Monday afternoon, Cleverly said: “I think the phrase ‘Stop the boats’ was an error.
“It distilled a very, very complicated and challenging problem into a soundbite. The implication — not the implication, I suppose the self-imposed yardstick was even one boat was a failure, and that was an unachievable target. As I say, I inherited that.
“One of my frustrations was that we failed to communicate our successes in the Home Office portfolio, and unsurprisingly, therefore everyone believed we had succeeded in nothing.”
The comments came as Cleverly also rubbished the idea that the Conservative Party lost votes at the recent election because it was “too left-wing or too right-wing.”
Rather, Cleverly argued that the Conservatives lost because of “tone and underperformance.”
“Our tone alienated a lot of people. … We were harsh and shrill and not nice”, Cleverly said, arguing that this resulted in many onetime Conservative voters backing the Liberal Democrats or staying at home.
Cleverly was also severely critical of the Conservative government’s response to the Covid 19 pandemic, singling it out as the worst thing it did. “Lockdowns were wrong, we got it badly, badly, badly wrong”, he said.
“We deified certain [epidemiological] experts”, he said, who “became gods among gods”. Experts on domestic abuse, children’s mental health and the economy, Cleverly added, were “relegated” in importance.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on X/Twitter here.
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