The globetrotting James Cleverly has had quite the year. From firing a bow-and-arrow in Kazakhstan to wearing eccentric shirts in Indonesia, the perenially red-socked foreign secretary has made his last year of travelling into the funniest photo shoot in British politics. Some worry that he is trivialising one of the great roles of state, but polls show that he is still remarkably popular.
Here, we will take a look at some of his strangest moments:
Here is Cleverly adopting the role of intrepid explorer high above the Colombian rainforest, replete with his neckerchief and a far wider grin than his irritated host, Colombia’s foreign minister Álvaro Leyva.
The hardest-working man in politics in the Kazakh national dress. It is unclear whether this shot was taken before or after the falconry.
Here he is cutting a dash in an Indonesian patterned shirt. The lady’s eyes say it all.
In his most recent trip to West Africa, he tweeted about the rising influence of Afrobeats as one of Africa’s most important cultural exports. Not only that, he created a TikTok-style video doing a blind taste test of different variants of Jollof rice.
Ahead of the imminent cabinet reshuffle, recently Cleverly was at pains to say how much he wants to continue travelling the world taking opportunistic snaps. He joked at the Aspen Security Forum that he would have to be dragged from his office kicking and screaming with “nail marks down the parquet flooring”. No wonder he wants to keep his job – travelling the world on the taxpayer’s dime shaking the right people’s hands sounds okay to this Hound.
From “Ladies, check your breasts!” to the Simpsons tweet mocking Humza Yousaf, there’s never a dull moment with James Cleverly.
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