One nation Conservative Jeremy Hunt is the unsung survivor of the Tory years in power
Once upon a time in Westminster, Budget purdah was strictly observed. In 1947, Hugh Dalton resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer because some brief details inadvertently remarked to a lobby journalist on his way into the chamber appeared on the evening paper front pages before he had finished his speech.
In the 1990s, Kenneth Clarke took a characteristically relaxed approach and removed the veil, while still maintaining that parliament would hear anything of substance first. Since then, the Chancellor’s bi-annual parliamentary set pieces – the Budget and the Autumn (sometimes Spring) Statement – have been preceded by a flurry of pre-announcements, policy kite-flying and advance media appearances by the Chancellor of the day and his ministers. So far always “his” ministers.
Jeremy Hunt is the latest man in the job. He is a One Nation Conservative who made his cabinet comeback a year ahead of David Cameron. He is an unsung survivor of the Tory years in power, having served Cameron, May, Truss and Sunak as a reliable minister. As a politician he has been consistently underestimated. He was twice rejected by his party as a potential leader. He recently had to deny he was planning to stand down at the next election. Now as he co-pilots Sunak’s attempt to restore the Conservatives’ economic credibility, it is too soon to write him off.
On Sunday morning, Chancellor Hunt was out and about, bright eyed and bushy tailed if looking a little older, on his media round of the BBC, Sky News and others. Polite, positive and on first name terms with all his interviewers, he openly played the game of not saying anything significant. He did better than Dalton at setting the tone while not giving anything away. “I want to show people there’s a path to lower taxes”, he told me on Times Radio, “but we also want to be honest with people, this is not doing to happen overnight,” adding that his “priority is backing British business” to “unlock growth”.
Hunt got controversial aspects of this week’s statement out of the way deftly beforehand by pre-announcing plans to cut back on welfare for those who “refuse to work”. Previous chancellors castigated “shirkers” and the “next-door neighbour, the blinds are down and that family is living a life on benefits”. But that is not his style. He stressed the positive aspect of the programme to help “people who want to work” into jobs.
Hunt went so far as to claim recent lower inflation statistics mean that the economy has “turned the corner”. Ever the diplomat he left it to the Prime Minister to go big on Monday and boast “You can trust me. We can start responsibly to cut taxes”. Hunt is delivering the speech on Wednesday, but the Prime Minister will own its content.
Hunt’s own pre-Autumn Statement appearances have been low key, and conciliatory. He visited ITM, the leading manufacturer of electrolysers for green hydrogen, promising investment in a sector which often feels neglected by government. Next he took part in a conference organised by the struggling and scandal-hit CBI.
Such behaviour was typical of his approach to politicking. He he has consistently been an emollient figure, always moderate and apparently happy to let others take the credit. While Cameron and Johnson bask in the glory of London 2012, few remember that Hunt was the cabinet minister responsible as Culture Secretary who took the decision to double the budget for the opening ceremony and to call in the army to sort out security.
Hunt was not Theresa May’s first choice to be Foreign Secretary. In the summer of 2018 he stepped in when Boris Johnson resigned. Nor was he chosen by Sunak to be Chancellor. He was hastily installed by Liz Truss in the dying days of her premiership in a desperate attempt to steady the economy after the bombastic Kwasi Kwarteng blew it up.
There was no obvious reason, beyond an instinct for public service, why Hunt should have accepted her offer. He had previously turned down Boris Johnson’s invitation to be Defence Secretary, after Johnson trounced his first bid to be party leader. When his second leadership bid, this time to succeed Johnson, fell in the first round, Hunt endorsed Sunak rather than Truss.
When pulled in as Chancellor by Truss, Hunt immediately appointed a panel of advisors with ties to previous chancellor’s Osborne and Hammond. For the few days until Truss fell, some nicknamed him “the Real Prime Minister”. When Sunak took over as a stability candidate, he had little alternative but to keep Hunt on.
Hunt coincided with David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford University, where he was elected President of its Conservative Association, OUCA. Like Cameron he studied PPE: Philosophy, Politics and Economics. But unlike them he did not go to Eton and was head boy of Charterhouse, the public school he did attend. This probably explains why Hunt comes across as contemporary and in touch. Unlike “the posh boys”, he manifests upper middle-class rather than pseudo aristocratic (or even aristocratic now Cameron is a Lord), in spite of being the eldest son of Admiral Sir Nicholas Hunt of the Royal Navy and reportedly a distant relative of the King.
After the Royal Navy his father worked in NHS management, his mother had been a nurse, and a cousin was a pioneer in orthopaedics. All of which may help explain Jeremy Hunt’s enduring interest in the health service. From 2012 to 2018, he remains the UK’s longest-serving health secretary. From the backbenches, he was an influential chair on the cross-party Health and Social Care Committee during the Covid pandemic and published a book on a consistent concern: Zero: Eliminating unnecessary deaths in a post-pandemic NHS.
Hunt made his own money outside politics. At the time the £14.5 million from the sale of his 48% share in Hothouse, the English Language teaching business he co-founded, earned him the reputation of being “the richest person in the cabinet” but it is small beer compared to the billions of Sunak’s extended family.
The controversies of Hunt’s political career have been minor compared to many of his Conservative colleagues – another factor in his durability. At DCMS he got too friendly, by force of polite proximity in a maternity unit, with Fred Michel, a lobbyist for News Corporation when it was attempting to take over Sky. But Lord Leveson found “there was much to commend in Mr Hunt’s handling of the bid” with no “credible evidence of actual bias”.
His years as Health Secretary were marked by austerity and confrontation with consultants and junior doctors. His plans for seven-day working were branded “impossible to deliver” and he was forced to impose a pay deal and new contract for striking junior doctors. Hunt made a point of reading letters every day from the bereaved who believed their family had been let down by the NHS.
Managerial competence and decency have been the hallmarks of Hunt’s ministerial dealings. He has always remained open to the relevant stakeholders while putting the interests of the public first. He is not known for tub-thumping. His initiatives have been framed moderately and many of them have not succeeded. If so he just picked up and got on with his job.
These modest qualities explain why Jeremy Hunt has had a more sustained political career than his flashier contemporaries. He could yet change his mind and retire as an MP but this seems unlikely. His quiet determination was on show again in his decision to risk “a Portillo moment” and to stand again at the next election, even though boundary changes make the chances of retaining his seat more difficult.
South West Surrey, the constituency he took over from Virginia Bottomley, has been abolished. Hunt has opted to be a candidate in Godalming and Ash, one of its partial replacements. He, his wife and three children have a home there and it is near where he grew up. He looks like a good bet in this corner of the “Blue Wall”.
Hunt says he has got over his ambitions to be party leader, which is probably sensible given the rightward direction in which the membership has evolved. But Hugh Dalton returned to the cabinet after resigning as chancellor. My guess is that Hunt will be one of the major players in the Conservative Party still standing, deservedly, after the approaching general election.
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