‘James had it worse than me. He worked in his big job every day and came home to a broken wife’

Susie Cleverly, wife of Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, talks about a year of juggling breast cancer, raising teenagers, meeting the King and doing the ironing. By Leah Hardy

On a brisk November morning in 2021, Susie Cleverly, then 48, was standing in the bathroom of the Essex constituency home she shares with husband James, waiting for the shower to warm up. “It’s old-fashioned and takes forever,” she laughs. She yawned, stretched her arms above her head, and then froze as she caught sight of herself in the mirror. “Underneath my right breast, the skin was all dimpled,” she says. “I knew it wasn’t great.”

Under normal circumstances, she may have been tempted to ignore what she’d seen but, by chance, a friend had previously been diagnosed with breast cancer after seeing very similar changes. So, Susie walked straight back into the couple’s bedroom and asked James, “Look, have you seen this before?”

How did she feel? Panicked? Distraught? Not quite. She says: “This was on November 13, Remembrance Day weekend. The GP surgery was closed, so I said, ‘Let’s forget about it, enjoy the weekend and go to the doctor on Monday,’ and that’s exactly what we did.

“I think I knew, but I also thought I’ve got a lot going on and I can’t have this in my head as well.”

Encouraged by James, Susie called her GP and was given an appointment the same day. “He examined me and found a lump that I hadn’t been able to feel, and he could see the dimpling.

“He said, ‘I’m going to refer you to the breast clinic. Take someone with you because it’s probably going to be bad news.’ That was probably the scariest moment I had because it was now very real.

“I rang James who was on his way to the Foreign Office. I was crying and told him, “I’ve got cancer.” He immediately said, ‘I’m coming home,’ rang his office and cleared his diary. We took the dogs for a long walk and talked about it. I cried a lot. I think I got a lot of my tears out that day. Then we rang my parents, family and close friends.”

She also told her sons, Freddy, 20, and Rupert, 18, immediately. “I wanted them to know straight away. I rang Freddy at university. Then I told Rupert when he came home from school. I didn’t want them to find out from anyone else. I wanted to be the one to tell them and reassure them.”

Her “keep calm and carry on” approach might sound surprising, but as I discover, Susie Cleverly is a remarkably stoical person.

When I ring the doorbell of the couple’s home in south-east London, a cacophony of barking greets me. Susie answers the door, two friendly border terriers tumbling at her feet, her willowy frame elegantly clad in a silk-satin blouse and loose tweed trousers.

As she makes me coffee, her fatherin-law, who lives with James and Susie, potters into the kitchen, and from upstairs I can hear Freddy as he packs to go back to university for his final year. Rupert is at sixth form. It’s very much a busy family home – “Sorry, it’s not the tidiest” – she says, leading the way into a cosy sitting room, where we find ourselves with a sofa and dog each.

Susie’s once long, blonde hair is now silvery, short and chic. It is not, however, the work of a Mayfair stylist. It is the result of months of chemotherapy.

It has been, she admits, a tumultuous year. Just three weeks after spotting herself in the mirror, Susie was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. At the time, James, the MP for Braintree since 2015, was working at the Foreign Office under Liz Truss. Then

‘We have such a strong bond and marriage… I couldn’t have done this without him’

everything changed. Susie says, “James was made Foreign Secretary on Tuesday 6 September and the Queen sadly died on the Thursday. Then it all kicked in.”

On the day before the Queen’s State Funeral, Susie met the new King and Queen Consort at Buckingham Palace, in a new black dress bought in a hurry at John Lewis. And after the funeral on Monday, she attended a reception for world leaders hosted by James. “It was a great honour to meet the King and Queen Consort,” she says. “He must have been shattered. I felt for him because I thought if it were me, the last thing I’d want to be doing is chatting to all these people. I’d want to curl up and mourn. It was a very sad time, and I was exhausted from having chemo the week before, but I think the adrenaline kept me going.”

As soon as the reception finished, the weary couple came home. “James cooked that night – he’s the cook in our house. He was going to New York the next day, so I was quickly ironing a few shirts, grabbing the bits and pieces he needed and trying to find a suitcase because everything had been so full-on until that point. It was our son’s 18th birthday the next day, too, so I had to get up really early to wrap presents before James left. It’s been crazy.”

The teamwork makes sense: James and Susie have been together for 29 years. When I say her Instagram account reveals them to be a hopelessly romantic couple, she laughs. “Yes, we are known for it,” she admits. The couple met when they were both studying at the University of West London. It was her first day and he served her at the student bar where he was working. They married in 2000 and Susie gave up work at an IT training company in the sales department when Freddy was born. She says: “We have such a strong bond, strong relationship and strong marriage. I couldn’t have done this without him.”

“This” refers to Susie’s gruelling experience of cancer. Which is the reason she is speaking to me today. For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she is keen to spread the word that breast cancer does not always present with a lump. Instead, she says, women should become familiar with their breasts and be vigilant for any changes. “Any change at all is key,” she says, urgently. “Get it checked out. Don’t put it off. If I hadn’t known that dimpling was a sign and seen a doctor, it might have been too late.”

Susie was diagnosed on December 3 at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospital in London. However, three mammograms had failed to find her cancer. She later found out this was because she has a condition called “dense breasts” meaning that she has less fatty tissue in her breasts than normal, which makes it harder to spot tumours (about one in 10 women have dense breasts which is why it is particularly important for all women to be aware of any changes in their breasts). An ultrasound later revealed more than 12 tumours. “The