Jeremy Hunt: the man whose fault it wasn't

New Statesman​

4 days ago

Illustration by André Carrilho
What a crowd! They're packing in to the auditorium, the air damp with breath. Students, retirees, office workers. The lecture theatre at the London School of Economics (LSE) is packed with Hunties. On the way in we pass tables loaded with books waiting to be signed. It's Jeremy Hunt's Eras tour. As with Taylor Swift, each era is, if anything, even more iconic than the one it preceded. The Culture Secretary Era, when he was introduced to the nation on the Today programme as 'the Hulture Secretary, Jeremy C…'; the Health Secretary Era (the longest-serving health secretary ever! And arguably the most damaging!); the Foreign Secretary Era (he was certainly not worse than Boris Johnson!). And of course his star turn as chancellor, during which he used the highest position of responsibility in the British economy, at perhaps its most important moment, to set a series of fiscal traps for Rachel Reeves. For weeks, WhatsApp groups have presumably buzzed with messages: 'Hey lovelies just managed to get tixx for Jeremy H!' 'Can't wait to hear him Huntsplain Britain's – and by extension his own – continued relevance on the international stage!' 'Cheeky Aperol spritz after?!'
And now here he is on stage, tanned and slim, in sage green chinos, dark brown brogues, a light blue shirt and a navy blazer – Tory up top, Boden down below – and he is recalling the last time he was in this building. It was 2016, and the polls said he was the least popular politician in the UK. The junior doctors were on strike – those guys! – and protesters had gathered outside, but they were on the lookout for a ministerial car; Hunt, who arrived on his bike, kept his helmet on and walked past them unrecognised. One of the security guards who kept the protesters at bay that day – Hunt doesn't use the man's name, calling him 'this gentleman' – is here tonight! And he's still watching the door, perhaps in case George Osborne barges in and orders him to sell a few more dialysis machines.
Hunt's introductory speech, and his new book, begin with his best anecdote. He was on a mini-break in Brussels with his wife when a text arrived: 'Please can you give me a call. Liz Truss here.' He assumed it was a hoax, ignored it and went for breakfast. It was only after two further messages from civil servants arrived that he realised the desperate PM really was asking him to come back and fix everything. He did this by reimposing the status quo, undoing the entire Trussonomic project in time for the market opening on Monday. He felt, he writes, 'absurdly prime ministerial' as he made the announcement. He was basically running the country. He told Truss it was 'in the national interest' that she resign quickly, 'otherwise the markets will collapse'. As he tells it, she meekly agreed – accepting a hug from Hunt, who called Graham Brady and others to organise her departure. Within a week he had sorted the markets and 'turned a £72bn deficit into a £10bn surplus'. Bosh!
But tonight he is not at the LSE to boast about his time as chancellor. He is here to boast about his time as foreign secretary. He recalls being shown into what is, by some distance, the most impressive office of any cabinet minister, being brought his sandwiches on a silver platter and asking himself: 'Are we kidding ourselves, that we have influence in the world?'
This question is the subject of his new book, Can We Be Great Again? Why a Dangerous World Needs Britain (or, as I could not help but read it: Can Jeremy Hunt Be Great Again? Why a Dangerous World Needs Jeremy Hunt). The answer is of course that Jeremy Hunt – sorry, Britain – continues to have 'considerable influence'. He envisions a world in which middle-power democracies (Australia, Britain, Japan, Germany) work together to counterbalance the US and China.
'Though Britain will never be the mightiest nation on Earth, we can be pivotal,' he says. No, hang on, that was Tony Blair in 1998. Brexit and the trade wars were decades in the future, but Blair was already asking everyone to remember that 'Britain does not have to choose between being strong with the US, or strong with Europe… Britain can be both.' The Conservative Party, as it turned out, had other ideas, which Hunt politely opposed rather than combatting with firmly held principles of his own, just as he had competently presided over the impact of austerity on the health service, and diligently managed Britain's diminished power in geopolitics. Whatever went wrong in the 14 years he spent running the country, it was regrettably due to the actions of someone else. Hunt is the Man Whose Fault It Wasn't.
I didn't go to any of the Westminster parties that took place on the evening of the general election last year. I spent the whole night in a leisure centre in Surrey, waiting for the 2024 Portillo Moment: the first unseating of a sitting chancellor.
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The Lib Dem who hoped to win was tall and stocky. He began the evening on bumptious form, surrounded by nervy acolytes. Gradually the piles of ballots looked less decisive, and as the night wore he seemed to deflate, like a cheap airbed. At about 3am a flap of shirt came untucked and no one bothered to tell him about it. Shortly before the result was called, Jeremy arrived, flanked by police officers. His suit was impeccable and he looked rested. The rain began a drum-roll on the corrugated ceiling. Hunt had held his seat by a slim margin, and the rest of us – the assembled journalists, the TV crew that had come from Japan, the Lib Dems – had wasted our time. Simultaneously, like coral polyps releasing their spores on the midnight tide, we let out a long, sad 'uuuuhhhh' of stale coffee breath – a gust of concentrated boredom and disappointment that almost blew the returning officer from the podium. Hunt, who was reported to have spent £100,000 of his own money on the campaign, gave a short speech about how fortunate we were to witness 'the magic of democracy'.
Since then he has said two really interesting things. The first was in an interview with Anoosh Chakelian on the New Statesman podcast, in which he said he had 'tried three times' to become leader of the Conservative Party (officially, he has only run twice so far). The second, in the lecture theatre at LSE, was this: 'People were so angry… I don't think that we could have done anything that would have changed the outcome of [the 2024] election.' The public, he told us, 'wanted the Conservative government out, last year, and one way or another that was going to happen'.
This is an important admission from Hunt. It confirms that when he was making Britain's economic policy, he was doing so under the assumption that Labour would shortly be left to deal with the results. When he was handing out tens of billions of pounds' worth of cuts to National Insurance, which he knew the country could not afford, when he was pencilling in tens of billions of pounds of (imaginary) spending cuts, which he knew public services could not sustain, he did so not because he thought it was the right thing for Britain's economy, but because it would make life harder for Rachel Reeves – who has, he purred, 'a very difficult job to do' – and because that might well limit Labour's time in government. That is a sociopathic way to run one of the world's largest economies.
And now here he is on stage, earnestly telling the crowd that the public has lost trust in politicians. However could that have happened? Politicians have become 'inauthentic', he warns. It is still party over policy, a game played between red and blue, while 70 million people have to deal with the results in their daily lives. He spreads his hands: 'Can't we do better than this?'
[See also: Kemi Badenoch isn't working]
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