To understand Jeremy Hunt’s position as a chancellor who now leads the country in all but name, let me take you to a dusty hot track in the north of Thailand in the late Eighties. Hunt and I were university contemporaries and he inhabited a world of more stellar young Tory figures, including Boris Johnson and David Cameron. My college friend and I were hiking slowly across stony uphill ground, moaning about the heat and dehydration.
Ahead of us, we saw a figure in a preppy striped blue shirt and chinos — alone and power walking with steady determination by himself. And I knew, for all the coincidence of the occasion, that this was Hunt, a leading light in the Oxford University Conservative Association.
