As political resurrections go, there are few more curious than the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as chancellor – a remainer whose career seemed to be going backwards only a few short weeks ago.
When the instinct of most Tory MPs is to run a mile from No 10, Hunt accepted the invitation from the desperate Liz Truss to go in the opposite direction. He has turned down unenviable cabinet job offers before – rejecting the post of defence secretary when offered by Boris Johnson, after losing the Tory leadership race to Johnson in 2019.
His friends say he felt he had no option, in the national and Conservative interest, but to see if something could be saved from the wreckage – and if it emerges no rescue is possible, little blame will be attached to him. Perhaps the salvage operation appeals to his naval family background. His father, Nicholas Hunt, was an admiral. Nothing else makes much sense.
Only weeks ago, this ambitious, calm man must have been contemplating standing down as a Tory MP at the next election since his career was clearly on the wane. After a year patiently waiting to pick up the mess of the Boris Johnson premiership, his ill-starred leadership attempt this summer fell badly flat when he won the support of a handful of MPs, reflecting the rightward tilt in the parliamentary party, and a desire on the centre-left of the party to look to a younger generation as standard-bearer.
It seemed a poor return for a man who had put in a credible challenge against Johnson in 2019, and had then sounded like a voice of rationality during the Covid outbreak as chair of the health and social care select committee. His was one of those voices people turned up their radio to hear. That view was not universal. The Daily Mail portrayed him as a lockdown fanatic.
Either way, his second stab at the Conservative leadership flopped badly.
He dropped out in the first round with the support of only 18 MPs. His colleagues clearly saw him as yesterday’s man, or even worse in Westminster parlance, a “retread”. Centrist Tories opted either for Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the foreign affairs select committee, or the politically elusive Penny Mordaunt.
Hunt may have lost credibility because of the way he tapered his message excessively to fitthe Tory party electorate.
In his brief election bid, he proffered himself as the biggest advocate of tax cuts to get the economy moving. He said that he would cut corporation tax from 19p to 15p on day one, a move that would have cost £34bn, alongside a five-year business rates holiday in the most deprived parts of the country.
Now, ironically, in one of his first acts as chancellor he has been instructed to raise corporation tax from 19p to 25p.
In his defence, he can argue he would never have proposed such wide-ranging tax cuts this autumn once it became clear so much would need to be spent subsidising energy bills.
Nor would not have proposed any tax cuts in the absence of an Office of Budget Responsibility-endorsed deficit reduction plan. The fact that he backed Sunak, not Truss, for the leadership suggested he was more financially orthodox than he had pretended.
But by throwing in his lot with an evidently out-of-its-depth No 10 operation, he has taken a personal risk, since he cannot guarantee his patron will remain in office beyond this weekend.
As a one nation Tory, he will also have to deliver unpopular spending cuts including to the health department, the aid programme, and probably local government, areas that have mattered to him.
His smooth technocratic tone as a media operator is bound to contrast with the prime minister’s. There will be little hint of trickle-down economics, and although he made £11m setting up Hotcourses –– which runs listings websites for education worldwide –– he does not idolise risk-taking entrepreneurs.
As a minister, Hunt also operates in a clear-eyed, disciplined way. In every department that he has led, he sets himself a defined set of tasks on which he will judge himself. He knows that if ministers spread themselves too thinly by covering the entire departmental waterfront, they achieve little but tick papers in a ministerial box provided.
In the Foreign Office he took up the themes of media freedom and religious freedom, and went as far as British government could on issues such as the Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
He is also willing to plough his own furrow, eventually taking up the cause of the British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after he went to see a play about her life.
Hunt is now in the strongest position possible to dictate terms to a weakened prime minister living on borrowed time. If he can assuage the markets, it will be Hunt as a competent chancellor, not Downing Street, who takes the credit.
