NEW Shadow Housing Secretary Sir James Cleverly has slammed the government as “useless” and accused ministers of “damaging the economy”.
Speaking to GB News, he said: “We are all Conservatives. We’re all passionate Conservatives. We believe in a lower tax economy. We believe in strong defence. We believe in law and order. We believe in the power of the individual rather than an overly large and officious state.
“We are all solid Conservatives, and we all agree that Keir Starmer and the Labour government are useless. They are doing damage to the economy. They are doing damage to society.
“They are failing to deliver. They thought it was going to be easy, and what they are now discovering is that government is hard, and we are united in holding them to account, supporting Kemi.”
Asked about his view on the ECHR, he said: “What Kemi has said is that the shadow Attorney General is going to conduct a review, and we’re going to look at the implications of the ECHR. And if the ECHR stops us doing what we have to do, then we have, of course, have got to look at how we might leave the ECHR, and the process for doing that.
“What I’ve said is that activists within the British legal system have been using any trick in the book to prevent us, when we were in government, from doing the right thing. And I said, we need to make sure they don’t do that even under a different human rights framework.
“Kemi and I are on exactly the same page on this. I want to make sure that when we are back in government, we can actually do what British people want us to do, to protect our borders, to protect them from criminals, when people need to be deported, that they can be deported and the fact they’re addicted to chicken nuggets doesn’t stop us from doing so. We are on exactly the same page on this.”
On whether he would stand for London Mayor, Cleverly said: “I’ve made it very clear that the recent habit of conservatives of swapping leaders at every opportunity did not work, and we should stop doing that. And I’ve been consistent in saying that.
“The simple fact of the matter is that London is the biggest city in the UK, and if the government has got any chance of hitting its housing targets, London needs to build lots of houses, and they have failed to do so.
“The reason I highlight London is because there are no excuses. They’ve had a Labour mayor. They’ve now got a Labour government.
“They said they were going to build 80,000 houses a year, and in the first quarter of this year they built 1,210, that’s about 5% of the target. So I’m highlighting the failure.
“What I will do in this new job is I will show there is a better way, a Conservative way, and I will show that actually in Conservative-run authorities, we’re getting stuff built. It’s the Labour-run authorities that are asleep at the wheel, and Sadiq Khan is the most high profile example of that.”
