Reputation: the luck of Churchill and the lens of history
History judges you at the end, but when that end comes is key: if Churchill had died in 1939, he would be thought a disaster; meanwhile Jeremy Hunt's stock rises but he will never be PM
Political reputations are notoriously fragile and quicksilver. Had Winston Churchill joined the choir invisible in 1938 or 1939, in his mid-60s—or, perhaps, had there been no second world war—his legacy would today be mixed to poor. He was politically unreliable, having been elected a Conservative MP in 1900, crossing the floor to become a Liberal in 1904. As a senior but tarnished backbencher, he chose his great friend David Lloyd George over H.H. Asquith in 1916; and he was a member of Lloyd George’s ephemeral National Liberal Party in 1922-23, remaining loyal when the Conservative Party revolted at the famous Carlton Club meeting in October 1922 but losing his seat in Dundee to prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour the following month despite the absence of a Conservative candidate. Churchill returned to the mainstream Liberal fold for the general election in 1923 but was defeated in Leicester West. In March 1924 he stood in a by-election in Westminster Abbey as a “Constitutionalist” and missed by only 43 votes despite official Conservative, Liberal and Labour candidates. Although he retained the label when he was elected for Epping in 1924—in the absence of a Conservative candidate—Stanley Baldwin appointed him chancellor of the Exchequer in the new government, Neville Chamberlain having declined the job, and he rejoined the Conservatives after two decades away.
It was not as if these ideological peregrinations were offset by unimpeachable political genius. He joined the cabinet in 1908 as president of the Board of Trade, aged only 33, and in that role he was responsible for some major social welfare provisions, including the Coal Mines Regulation Act 1908, which limited the working day for miners to eight hours, the Trade Boards Act 1909, which brought in the first minimum wage, and the Labour Exchanges Act 1909, which created the first government-operated job centres. Promoted to home secretary in 1910, he began a series of prison reforms, increasing educational provision and reducing the use of solitary confinement, and during his 18-month tenure he commuted 21 of the 43 capital sentences which passed across his desk. But his mercurial nature was a problem; in November 1910, when striking miners clashed with police in. Tonypandy, he allowed soldiers to move to Swindon and Cardiff at the request of the chief constable of Glamorgan, Lionel Lindsay, but, contrary to red-tinged socialist folk memory, he refused them permission to deploy against the strikers, instead sending 270 unarmed policemen from the Metropolitan Police to assist Glamorganshire Constabulary.
The following year, when two Latvian revolutionaries were cornered in a house at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney, he authorised the deployment of a unit of Scots Guards from the Tower of London to assist the police, the first time military personnel had ever been used alongside the police for an armed siege. The soldiers arrived at 10.00 am on 3 January 1911, and quickly began shooting; shortly before noon, Churchill himself arrived, resplendent in shiny silk top hat and full-length overcoat, to assess the situation. An official Metropolitan Police history of the episode noted “a very rare case of a Home Secretary taking police operational command decisions”, but Churchill, later writing to The Times, fiercely denied that he had done anything except observe:
I did not interfere in any way with the dispositions made by the police authorities on the spot. I never overruled those authorities nor overrode them. From beginning to end the police had an absolutely free hand.
His biographers tend to endorse his version of events, but the public image was unchanged: the dynamic young home secretary putting himself directly in harm’s way.
There were some dreadful black marks against his record before 1939. The invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915, which led to a disastrous and bloody campaign of no lasting strategic value, stemmed directly from a plan by the secretary of state for war, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, to relieve Turkish pressure on Russia in the Caucasus; but Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty, supported it strongly and proposed a naval passage of the Dardanelles. When the expedition’s failure became apparent, Churchill was one of those held chiefly responsible, and he was forced out of the Admiralty when the Conservatives joined the government in May 1915. As war secretary in 1919-21, he oversaw the deployment of the often-violent Royal Irish Constabulary auxiliaries known as the “Black and Tans” during the Irish War of Independence.
There is also a persistent belief that Churchill authorised the use of chemical weapons during the Iraqi Revolt in 1920. He certainly did not oppose the measure on principle: shells containing ethyl iodoacetate, a tear gas, were transported to Mesopotamia and could have been used but the commanders on the ground decided not to use them on purely practical grounds; and Churchill pushed for research into whether mustard gas could be dropped from the air. He was regarded opposition to the use of such weapons as “unreasonable”. A War Office minute of May 1921 set out his views clearly.
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.
Nevertheless, there is little evidence that chemical weapons were in the end used in Mesopotamia, although the British had used them in the theatre during the First World War, for example at the Second Battle Of Gaza in 1917 (which they lost).
Churchill was surprised to be made chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924. As we have seen, Baldwin’s first choice had been Neville Chamberlain, who had held the post from August 1923 to January 1924, but the future prime minister preferred to serve as minister of health, as he had done earlier in 1923, and quickly presented cabinet with a list of 25 bills he wanted to pass. By the next election in 1929, 21 of them had become law; at that period, the Ministry of Health was responsible not only for its titular policy area but also the Poor Law, national insurance, local government, planning, housing and environmental health. Churchill was moved by the offer of the Treasury, not least becaused it was the highest office his father, Lord Randolph, had reached, and he may have wept: certainly, he told Baldwin “This fulfils my ambition. I still have my father’s robe as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid Office.”
His time as chancellor is largely remembered for the decision in 1925 to return sterling to the Gold Standard, which it had abandoned as a temporary measure in 1914. Churchill was not an economist: by instinct he was a free trader but had no real expertise in the field, and he admitted in private that the advice against returning to gold from John Maynard Keynes was convincing. He chose to return to the Gold Standard as a symbolic matter of fiscal virility, but the experience left him with a deep distrust of HM Treasury and the Bank of England, by whom he felt pressured and hoodwinked, and especially of the then-governor of the Bank, Montagu Norman, described by Keynes as “always absolutely charming, always absolutely wrong”. The Gold Standard Act 1925 resumed convertability at the pre-First World War rate of $4.86 to the pound, but the result was a disaster: exports fell while interest rates rose. Mine owners cut pay to offset lower profits, as well as proposing longer working hours, and in April 1926 the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain declined the terms offered. The Trades Union Congress called a general strike beginning on 4 May, and although it was called off after nine days, the mining industry had been dealt a severe blow. Economic decline continued, exacerbated by the burden of heavy war debt.
Perhaps finishing the charge sheet against Churchill before 1939 would be two issues of judgement which came to the fore in the 1930s. The first was the matter of self-government for India. The Raj was still seen as the lynchpin of the British Empire: 1.5 million Indian soldiers had served in the First World War and 74,000 had been killed, which shone a light on the lack on Indian participation in the government of India. The Government of India Act 1919 had made some modest concessions but was obviously only a first step, and in 1930 the Indian Statutory Commission chaired by Sir John Simon, the Liberal former home secretary, presented its report to Parliament, in which it presented recommendations for further, still modest, reforms.
The Goverment of India Act 1935 (until 1999 the longest single piece of legislation the UK Parliament had ever passed) set out a constitutional framework which would see India became a “federation” within the Empire, though not a self-governing dominion on the model of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland, the Union of South Africa and the Irish Free State. Nevertheless, there was a clear direction of travel, and in April 1936 the Marquess of Linlithgow, a former Conservative minister who had chaired the joint committee on Indian constitutional reform in 1933-34. was appointed viceroy of India to supervise the implementation of the act.
Churchill took a determined stance against self-government for India. After the Conservatives lost the 1929 general election, he fell into a period of frustrated depression and tried to stay active writing a biography of his ancestor the 1st Duke of Marlborough; at the beginning of 1931, he resigned from the Conservative Leader’s Consultative Committee, the proto-shadow cabinet, when Baldwin settled on supporting dominion status. Churchill viewed dominion status as a Trojan horse, likely to hasten independence, and he had a particular hatred for Mohandas Gandhi. he described the Mahatma as a “malignant subversive fanatic” and, with creative venom, “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace”.
Churchill and Gandhi had met, once, in 1906. The former had been under-secretary of state for the colonies, the latter, a 37-year-old barrister of the Inner Temple, a representative of the Indian community of South Africa and founder of the Natal Indian Congress. It is not clear what stirred the deep antipathy, bleeding into hatred, that Churchill had by the 1930s. Certainly he feared Gandhi’s disruptive potential; perhaps he found the Indian’s transition from London suit and tie to simple, homespun loincloth distasteful or theatrical. There is fierce controversy over Churchill’s views on race and his general attitude towards Indians; my own view is that he was not noticeably more prejudiced than anyone else of his age, background and class. It is true that the British political establishment had an instinctive sympathy for monotheistic Muslims over Hindus. But it is also true that Churchill would not have understood or conceptualised ethnic or racial identity in the way modern society does.
Mainstream Westminster opinion was, even if grudgingly, accepting of the move towards self-government for India. When the House of Commons debated dominion status on 3 December 1931, Churchill sought to derail the motion by adding that:
Nothing in the said policy shall commit this House to the establishment in India of a Dominion constitution as defined by the Statute of Westminster; provided also that the said policy shall effectively safeguard British trade in and with India from adverse or prejudicial discrimination; and provided further that no extensions of self-government in India at this juncture shall impair the ultimate responsibility of Parliament for the peace, order, and good government of the Indian Empire.
This was a circumlocutory rejection. He pressed the matter to a division at the end of the debate, and 42 other MPs supported his proposed new wording. 369 MPs voted against. The balance of opinion was clear. It may be, of course, as has so often been the way over the past century, that the Conservative Party membership in the country was some way to the right of its representatives and may have been closer to Churchill’s views, but in the 1930s the membership had little input into the policy-making process.
With 83 other Conservative MPs, Churchill voted against the Government of India Bill in 1935, but it was overwhelmingly clear that self-determination, in however full a degree, was inevitable. Although the advent of the Second World War affected the timing and the process, it did not, in the end, affect the outcome, and India (separated into India and Pakistan) became independent in 1947. If posterity had been assessing Churchill in 1938 or 1939, it would have found him a stubborn if determined opponent of what was looking like the tide of history.
The last cause which Churchill espoused in the 1930s which reflected a degree of recklessness and poor judgement was his support of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, in his relationship with Wallis Simpson. In this, his motives may have been benign: Churchill was a natural romantic and liked the idea of the handsome young prince being allowed to marry the woman with whom he was so clearly in love, whatever “in love” means. Wallis charmed Churchill, as she did many (but not all) people, and during 1936 he conceived what became known as the “Cornwall plan”, whereby the king would contract a morganatic marriage with Mrs Simpson, a European dynastic device whereby the wife did not attract the rank and status of her husband and any children were not eligible to inherit titles, and Wallis would become Duchess of Cornwall rather than queen.
Superficially there was not too much wrong with the idea. Children were not likely to result from any union the king and Wallis might contract, so the morganatic marriage would be primarily a protocol issue. That said, as would be proved over the succeeding 25 years, Edward was obsessed with the status his wife was (or was not) accorded and hyper-sensitive to any slights. In any event, morganatic marriages were largely unknown to British inheritance law and customs: unions between men and women of significantly differing rank were not unusual—only two of Henry VIII’s six marriages were to brides of princely status, and Anne of Cleves was only the daughter of the Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor—and it would have been a complicated and potentially divisive innovation.
Although Churchill was a loyal monarchist, and came to enjoy a good relationship with George VI after he became prime minister, he regretted the abdication. On Christmas Day 1936, he wrote to his old friend Lloyd George:
I am profoundly grieved at what has happened. I believe the Abdication to have been altogether premature and probably quite unnecessary.
He was failing to grasp the wider picture. The first was a theological and doctrinal issue: the Church of England, the established church of which Edward VIII was supreme governor, was unambiguous on the position of divorcées. It stipulated that “in no circumstances can Christian men or women re-marry during the lifetime of a wife or a husband”, and Wallis had not one but two living ex-husbands, Winfield Spencer Jr and Ernest Simpson. This mattered: at his accession council, according to the provisions of the Accession Declaration Act 1910, Edward had sworn a solemn oath that he would:
According to the true intent of the enactments which secure the Protestant succession to the Throne of my Realm, uphold and maintain the said enactments to the best of my powers according to law.
This was non-negotiable. The Anglican hierarchy was implacable; the prime ministers of the dominions were unanimous that the king must abdicate if he wished to marry Wallis; Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, and the Liberal leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair, held the same view; The Times, The Morning Post, The Daily Herald, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Daily Sketch and The Sunday Graphic all opposed a marriage to Mrs Simpson; and Stanley Baldwin, though exhausted and keen to give up the office of prime minister, opposed the marriage, and had won a general election the previous year with a crushing majority of 242. One can guess at the opinion of the general public, but it will be no more than a guess, and is eclipsed by the fact that the political and constitutional establishment was formidably entrenched against any marriage while the king remained on the throne.
Of course everything changed with the coming of war in 1939 and the resignation of Neville Chamberlain in 1940. That is the unpredictability of history, and one of its many delights. One might also reflect that Churchill reached another nadir, albeit not nearly so deep, after the Labour victory of 1945. While we have come to rationalise that general election as voters thanking Churchill for winning the war but wanting Attlee to win the peace, and it has been suggested that a significant portion of the electorate was ignorant enough of the electoral process that it believed that Churchill would continue as prime minister whatever the election result, it stung Churchill deeply.
He should not have been surprised. With the exception of a rogue poll in June 1945, every test of opinion since 1943 has shown Labour in the lead. Churchill had to pay attention to being leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party in a way he had never done before, and had to reckon with the fact that his party had only spent three years in opposition in the last 30. When voters considered the experiences of the 1930s with their economic hardship and high unemployment, it was hard for Conservatives to disclaim any responsibility. The campaign, just three weeks long, was a dismal affair for the caretaker government, and Churchill’s surprisingly sharp attacks on Attlee did not win over voters. In particular, the prime minister’s first radio broadcast of the campaign, on 4 June, was couched in language many listeners found appalling.
No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.
This was strong stuff even for a peacetime election, but directed at men and women who had been his wartime coalition partners until so recently it left an especially sour taste. It is extraordinary to think that this broadcast was made only six weeks after the BBC had (reluctantly) screened Richard Dimbleby’s desperate, horrifying report on the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen (trigger warning). It seemed unthinkable that Churchill the War Hero could talk in terms such as these.
These are not our predominant recollections of Churchill, however. As well as reflecting on my principal point, which is that his reputation would have been different and calamitous if it had been viewed from a terminus of 1938 or 1939, it’s also worth reflecting, as we have to again and again these days in the face of witless, ahistorical, simplistic judgements that almost no historical figure has a legacy which is only good, revealing no blemishes. Even the Blessed Virgin Mary, who has benefited from a lot of positive publicity over the past two millennia, comes in for some criticism from mediaeval Jewish authors who suggest she was not faithful to Joseph.
To the pure historical process, the virtue or vice of a figure from the past should be irrelevant: history is not a gigantic popularity competition or morality test, and the important thing is knowing as much about our forbears as we can discover. Churchill is a different category, as he is a national hero, regularly named as the greatest Briton in history, and equally regularly then bombared with accusations of all kinds of wrongdoing. For someone so iconic in our society, it is not unfair at least to examine the character of the man, and there are plenty of entries in the debit column (though my own view is that one of the favourite charges against him, responsibility for the Bengal Famine of 1943, can be substantially refuted). But all of this, from dubious claims of attempted genocide in Bengal to the failings listed above, must be set against his titanic achievement of inspiring, sustaining and embodying a nation which had its back to the wall by the summer of 1940 in a way it had never experienced, certainly not since the Anglo-Saxon shield wall at the top of the ridge had begun to waver and crack at Hastings on 14 October 1066. Churchill was that rare artefact, a man for whom the hour and come and who was uniquely fitted to seize that opportunity. And that sealed his place in history.
A short coda. I began this essay, believe it or not, intending to use Churchill has a short but well-known example and then move on to the substance, which is Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor of the Exchequer. I am not, for the avoidance of doubt, suggesting that Hunt is a Churchillian figure, nor, I’m sure, would he. The point I wanted to make, and which I think is worth setting on the record, is that Hunt has quietly undergone a substantial reputational transformation, in a way which—as with Churchill, you see—reminds us that legacy depends on the point from which it is viewed.
Hunt was first elected to the House of Commons in 2005. Aged 38 at the time, he seemed younger, still wide-eyed and enthusiastic, a one-time management consultatnt who had taught English in Japan and then embarked on an entrepreneurial career which, after some false starts, would eventually make him a rich man when he sold his stake of the educational guide company he has set up for a profit of £14 million in 2017. He managed, perhaps because David Cameron, then newly elected leader, had mitigated much of the risk, to avoid much disapproval for his privileged background. But he is very posh: son of Admiral Sir Nicholas Hunt, who retired from the Royal Navy as Commander-in-Chief Fleet, effectively the navy’s operational head, he was head of school at Charterhouse and then won a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Magdalen College, Oxford.
Once he was elected to Parliament, Hunt seemed unstoppable. First becoming an MP in May 2005, he was appointed in December to be shadow minister for disabled people. That same year, he was a co-author of a pamphlet entitled Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party. In 2007, having spent only just over two years in the House of Commons, he was appointed shadow culture secretary. He carried the portfolio over into government in 2010 and became minister for the Olympics, with the Games of the XXX Olympiad in London then only two years away. At the beginning fo 2012, he decided to double the budget for the opening ceremony of the games, directed by Danny Boyle, to £81 million, concluding “Future generations would never forgive us if we didn’t grasp the opportunity of hosting the Olympics to create jobs for British businesses”.
In September 2012, he was obviously due for promotion. Having essentially made sure no disasters befell the games, and being a fluent and articulate communicatory, he as chosen by Cameron to be health secretary. He replaced Andrew Lansley, who, despite having shadowed the post for six years in opposition and steeping himself in the subject, had been a disastrous ministerial chief. He introduced a Health and Social Care Bill in January 2011 which in its initial form made sweeping structural changes to the NHS. and there was such vehement opposition for clinicians and others that in April the government announced a “pause” in the legislation’s progress. By the summer of 2012, the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing had taken formal votes of no confidence in Lansley. It was time for a change.
Hunt would be health secretary for nearly six years; no-one has held the portfolio for longer since it was created in 1919. He would preside over a period of a consistently increasing NHS budget but would face controversy and unpopularity on a number of fronts. On appointment there was criticism from those who had read (or heard of) his 2005 pamphlet, but equally Tom Chivers of The Daily Telegraph reported that Hunt had expressed interest in and support for homeopathy. He also said publicly that he favoured reducing the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 12 weeks. Instantly, he was fighting on several fronts.
He would continue to grapple with the life-comes-at-you-fast existence of health secretaries. Waiting lists soared, to the extent that by the end of 2017 the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, was publicly warning of a coming crisis. In 2014, he announced that a recommended pay rise for non-medical staff receiving progression pay (about 55 per cent of all non-medical staff). There was a confrontation with doctors over weekend cover the following year, following by a long and exhaustive battle over a new contract for junior doctors. When Theresa May reshuffled her cabinet at the beginning of 2018, it was widely expected that Hunt would move sideways, and should think himself lucky to do so. The favourite notion was that he and Greg Clark would swap jobs, with Hunt moving to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Another theory was that Hunt would be replaced by Anne Milton, a former nurse at that point serving as minister for skills and apprenticeships.
The reshuffle was a damp squib in the way only Theresa May could have arranged it: Gordon Rayner called it “The Night of the Blunt Stiletto”, while Gary Gibbon thought more laterally and dubbed it “The Night of the Long Plastic Forks”. What seems to have happened is that Hunt refused to move to BEIS, but either asked for, or was saddled with, additional responsibility for social care, having it added to the department’s formal name. Hunt himself added to the air of haplessness, “accidentally” liking a tweet by Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, which reported the resignation of education secretary Justine Greening.
Then suddenly that battle seemed pointless. In July 2018, after May’s cabinet eventually agreed a Brexit strategy after a weekend at Chequers, David Davis, Brexit secretary, and Boris Johnson, foreign secretary, walked out of the government, regarding the deal agreed as insufficiently radical and far-reaching. Prominent Brexiteer Dominic Raab was appointed to replace Davis, but the prime minister turned to Hunt, who had supported the Remain campaign, to be foreign secretary. He had the appropriate weight for the job: apart from the prime minister, only he and Philip Hammond, the chancellor (who had been foreign secretary 2014-16) had been in cabinet constantly since 2010. There were few other obvious candidates: among Brexiteers, Michael Gove was too mischievous and unpredictable, Liam Fox had a critical job to do as international trade secretary and Chris Grayling, inexplicably transport secretary, hadn’t been the answer to anyone’s question for nearly a decade; of the potential Remainers, David Lidington was too valuable as May’s de facto deputy, Sajid Javid had only become home secretary in April and Gavin Williamson, yet to reveal to depths of his malicious potential, had the job he’d wanted as defence secretary. So Hunt it was.
The year Hunt spent at the Foreign Office was important in that it made him an obvious candidate to seek the premiership when Theresa May bowed to the inevitable in the summer of 2019. (The role itself was a diminished one: the creation of the Department for International Trade in 2016 had stripped away some responsibilities, and policy on Europe was being run from the Department for Exiting the European Union and from Downing Street, to which May had recalled Olly Robbins, briefly DExEU permanent secretary, as her personal adviser on Brexit.) A period striding the world stage and posing for phot opportunities with foreign statesmen is usually a reputational boon, and it helped Hunt look like a grown-up. He took a tough line on Iran and Russia, though his support for Saudi Arabia despite the ongoing civil war in Yemen caused some controversy.
I’ve written before about the passage from the Foreign Office to the premiership, explaining why it’s relatively rare, but I also stressed that being foreign secretary will usually put you in the mix ex officio. The 2019 leadership election was frantic. Ten candidates put themselves forward when nominations opened: Boris Johnson was an inevitable runner, as this was his appointment with destiny; it had been anticipated that Philip Hammond, the chancellor, and Amber Rudd, work and pensions secretary, would be runners, though neither did stand (and each endorsed Hunt); on the right, Liam Fox toyed with joining the race but declined (again, he supported Hunt).
There was an inevitability that the race would narrow to Johnson against a non-Johnson candidate. Rory Stewart, international development secretary, threatened for a time to upset expectations: his frank and articulate manner, obvious earnestness and deep thought, and simple quirkiness caught the eye of a jaded electorate. Some felt that he would be popular with the voters at large if he could clear the hurdle of winning the support of the Conservative Party. But the parliamentary party did its job in narrowing the field: the first ballot on 13 June knocked out Andrea Leadsom, Mark Harper and Esther McVey while Matt Hancock withdrew; Dominic Raab was eliminated on 18 June; the next day Rory Stewart fell; and successive ballots on 20 June disposed of Sajid Javid and Michael Gove. But Hunt was trailing badly: in that last round, Johnson had won 160 votes, while Hunt, on 77, had only just fended off Gove on 75. The subsequent ballot of party members was a walkover, Johnson taking 66.4 per cent of the votes cast to Hunt’s 33.6 per cent.
When Johnson assembled his cabinet at the end of July, Hunt’s time as foreign secretary was over. He seems to have fought hard, perhaps remembering his victory over Theresa May the previous year, telling Johnson that he would accept only staying where he was or becoming chancellor of the Exchequer or deputy prime minister. He was offered a move to the Ministry of Defence, but his allies described it as a “demotion”—an arguable case resting more on tradition than reality—and that was that. There may have been a degree of fatigue at play too: he tweeted later that day “after nine years in Cabinet and over 300 cabinet meetings, now is the time to return to backbenches from where the PM will have my full support”.
July is a bad time to force politicians to make decisions. The parliamentary term is coming to an end and exhaustion is palpable, and it was hot, brushing 30℃ the day Johnson’s victory was announced and again the following day as he assembled a cabinet. Hunt had also pointed out that his three children had all been born while he was a serving cabinet minister. But the summer adjournment seemed to restore him. In October he founded Patient Safety Watch, a charity to investigate preventable harm in the NHS and campaign for better patient safety. He held his South West Surrey seat by almost 9,000 votes in the December 2019 general election, and when Parliament reassembled he was ready for a new task.
The chair of the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee in the previous parliament had been Dr Sarah Wollaston, a West Country general practitioner who had been elected Conservative MP for Totnes in 2010 after winning an open primary for the candidacy. In 2014, she had been elected chair of the committee, but in February 2019, she had resigned the Conservative whip, joining The Independent Group of dazed centrist MPs then the ill-fated Change UK. This meant she would leave the Commons in 2019 and the chair of the Health Committee would be vacant. Hunt decided to stand for it.
A former secretary of state turning scrutineer was not unknown. Wollaston’s well-regarded predecessor, Stephen Dorrell, had chaired the committee from 2010 to 2014 but had been health secretary as far back as the Major government in 1995-97. In 2020 Hunt was not the only cabinet refugee. Greg Clark, with whom he had almost swapped jobs in 2018, was eyeing the Science and Technology Committee, while Karen Bradley, dropped as Northern Ireland secretary the summer before, put herself forward to head the Procedure Committee. Hunt comfortably overcame the MP for Newton Abbot, former corporate lawyer Anne-Marie Morris, with 433 votes to 116.
Health was of course placed front and centre within months of Hunt’s election as the Covid-19 pandemic hit the UK. He caught the public eye in May 2021 when he and Greg Clark chaired a joint session of their committees to take evidence from former senior adviser to the prime minister, Dominic Cummings, on how the government handled the opening stages of the outbreak. It was a seven-hour marathon, but it was electrifying too, Cummings speaking frankly, colourfully and eloquently about the chaos behind the scenes.
His backbench status allowed Hunt to remain a senior figure but, as the Johnson government began to disintegrate in 2022, he must have been grateful not to be on the inside. In May, he made another written contribution to the debate over the National Health Service with Zero: Eliminating unnecessary deaths in a post-pandemic NHS, in which he pointed to 150 preventable deaths a week and urged “candour, a no-blame culture and a sincere determination to treat every mistake as an opportunity to learn how to do better next time”. He had pledged to make social care a central part of his work, arguing that “the NHS will continue to fall over every winter until we fix social care, risking both patient safety and staff morale.” He had also highlighted mental health, patient safety and failings in maternity care.
When Boris Johnson was forced to resign in July 2022, Hunt still had a sufficiently high profile to consider another tilt at the leadership. Although he had always been regarded as a moderate, his policy platform, sketched out initially in The Sunday Telegraph, was not as straightforward as it might have been. His three main pledges were to restore public trust, grow the economy and win the general election due by 2025. He played on his position the backbenches since 2019 to remind his colleagues and potential voters that he was not tainted by association with Johnson. In economic terms, he made generic promises about prosperity: “What we need to do is to turn ourselves from a high-tax, low-growth economy, into a low-tax, high-growth economy”.
But he proposed tax cuts, reducing corporation tax to just 15 per cent and scrapping business rates entirely for five years for the most deprived areas of the country. He went on to attack Johnson’s levelling-up agenda as “far too New Labour”, dismissing the infrastructure projects Johnson was easily swayed by, and instead emphasising an almost Thatcherite dogma of setting the people free and trusting them to fend for themselves.
It’s been about infrastructure—a road here, a hospital there. These things matter. But in the end, what matters is wealth creation, which means that people don’t feel that they need to leave a Bolton or a Bolsover because they can get better jobs in Manchester or London. They can actually stay there. That means helping them have opportunities at home that makes talented people want to stay, not go.
It was a radical proposition which would have had Michael Gove beaming with delight. Hunt admitted that cuts to personal taxation could not happen straight away but made it clear that was his direction of travel. He pledged that Esther McVey, the populist former TV presenter and MP for Tatton, would be his deputy prime minister, and he concluded, of all things, with a nod to Gordon Brown. Why should his colleagues support him this time? “Because, to quote someone who Conservatives don’t normally quote, this is no time for a novice.”
It was a short leadership campaign. When MPs voted for the first time on 13 July, Hunt was bottom of the poll, with only 18 votes, and therefore eliminated. This was especially humiliating because he had needed at least 20 nominees to be on the ballot paper, so there had clearly been signatories who had either lend him their support just so that he was included, or who had then decided not to back him when it came to the real thing. He went on to back Rishi Sunak in the eventual poll, but it was Liz Truss who emerged victorious. Truss appointed a distinctive “cabinet of loyalists”, with eyebrows perhaps rising most sharply at the nomination of Dr Thérèse Coffey as health secretary and deputy prime minister, and the former attorney general, the forgettable Suella Braverman, becoming home secretary. One anonymous former cabinet minister observed “There are a lot of big hitters not on the pitch”.
This must have seemed like the formal end of Hunt’s front-line career. He was approaching 56, nine years older than the prime minister and clearly not regarded as someone who had to be inside the tent pissing out. Truss showed no signs of reaching out beyond her support base, and had not offered her defeated rival, Rishi Sunak, a place (though it is hard to see what role he would have played, since he would not have been chancellor). The crucial role of running the Treasury went to Truss’s long-standing friend Kwasi Kwarteng, intellectually formidable as a King’s Scholar at Eton, a Browne Medallist at Trinity College, Cambridge and a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard with a PhD in economic history.
It unravelled very quickly. On 23 September, he announced The Growth Plan to the House of Commons, a radical economic approach which cut taxes, liberalised planning and proposed investment zones. The markets were spooked and kicked back, the pound dropped sharply and the Bank of England had to spend billions of pounds calming the bond markets. Truss was holed below the waterline but would not admit defeat immediately: she had not risen so far by being faint-hearted. On 14 October, she summoned Kwarteng back from Washington DC where the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were holding their annual general meetings, and fired him. He had been chancellor of the Exchequer for 38 days.
Perhaps Truss finally decided she needed to extend a hand to other factions of the Conservative Party, and asked Hunt to become chancellor. It was noted that he had never served in the Treasury, but his cabinet experience—nine years of continuous service across three departments—plus his semi-impartial role as a select committee chair gave him heft which no-one else available could have matched. He proved his worth within hours essentially by indicating that the more controversial parts of The Growth Plan would be discreetly strangled; but, more than that, with a prime minister who was uneasy in front of the cameras and could seem febrile, his reassuring, erect-in-the-saddle manner seemed to have a soothing effect. Once again, he felt like the grown-up.
Liz Truss was doomed. Once the parliamentary party could contemplate the idea of a third prime minister in as many months, it became an inevitable outcome. Although some colleagues considered putting themselves forward, the runner-up of the summer, Rishi Sunak, became prime minister unopposed on 25 October. He kept Hunt in position, realising how much reassurance the appointment had brought to the financial world, and the two seemed largely aligned on policy, recognising that some stringent measures would be needed to get the economy back on its feet.
All of which brings me, at much greater length than I had expected, to Jeremy Hunt delivering his Autumn Statement last week. It was not an earthshaking document, and it is hard to imagine anything in it will even begin to turn the tide of the government’s electoral fortunes; defeat at a general election next autumn still seems the most likely outcome. (I wrote in City AM that the sale of the government’s remaining shares in NatWest Group could herald a return to the kind of shareholder democracy which infused the mid-1980s with energy and optimism, but it won’t be enough in the short term; something to watch in potential ideological battles of the future.)
It was, however, striking how at ease and authoritative Hunt seemed. He has been in the House of Commons for nearly 20 years now, one of only 75 Conservative MPs out of 350 who have been in opposition, and he is freed from the burden of expectation. At the despatch box, he was fluent and relaxed. As Andrew Marr noted in The New Statesman:
He made quite good jokes. He was calmly authoritative and spoke of “compassionate conservatism” as he focused on poorer workers, and pointedly backed established institutions such as the Bank of England: this week, Jeremy Hunt seemed at times less like yet another Tory chancellor, than a prime minister the modern party has repeatedly refused to allow itself to be led by… But Hunt’s problem, as his shadow Rachel Reeves quickly spotted, is the Tories’ record. The Conservatives will go into the election being judged not on Jeremy Hunt, but on Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and the Tory right.
It is not only Marr, the former Maoist from the High School of Dundee and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, who was impressed by the chancellor. Steven Vass, writing in The Conversation, called the measures “cleverly crafted” and argued that Hunt had “probably read the public mood correctly that after a decade of austerity and fears about a cost-of-living crisis, they would not support cuts being predominantly in public services”. Even a sceptical Tom Clark, writing in Prospect, admitted the chancellor “has a good feel for both business and Middle England”.
This brings us full circle, in a sense. The Conservative Party is febrile and skittish, rightly anxious about the future and plagued in parts by a degree of buyer’s remorse (if one can call it that) about the prime minister it allowed to happen. It will need a little more distance for us to understand how Rishi Sunak went from a junior minister with responsibility for local government to an inevitable candidate for the premiership in three years, but some MPs now feel that such a smooth and unflustered rise may have come too soon. Sunak is certainly showing the strain of battle now. It is understandable that some look at the chancellor, calm and in good spirits, and wonder what happened; they may even wonder “What if…?”
It will not happen. I will say categorically (because I love a good risk to fortune) that Jeremy Hunt will not be bundled into Number 10 Downing Street this side of a general election, nor will he become leader of the Conservative Party after it (though, mischievously, I would point out that he’s more than four years younger than Sir Keir Starmer). More than that, I’d suggest that the only reason a few people are now looking at him curiously is because it is now impossible. Not only does he have the allure of the impossible, he has an ease about him which is unusual in politicians.
It can come very late in the career: think of Margaret Thatcher at the despatch box for her final Prime Minister’s Questions on Thursday 22 November 1990. She must have been dizzy with betrayal yet she was in high spirits. When the Liberal Democrat Alan Beith asked if she would continue her “personal fight against a single currency and an independent central bank when she leaves office”, it was Dennis Skinner, Labour MP for Bolsover and a man believed much wittier than he was, who seized the opportunity of a beat of silence.
“No,” he growled, “she’s going to be the guv’nor!”
The eyes flashed. “What a good idea!” Thatcher exclaimed. “I hadn’t thought of that.” With machine-gun diction she shredded the notion of a central bank, then paused. “Now, where were we? I’m enjoying this!”
Churchill was the reverse of this pattern. For him it was an impossibility which suddenly flowered into an inevitability. He had done so much before 1939 which should have disqualified him from the highest office, and would have done, but that moment of fate, that turning point in history summoned him forward.
Tacitus said of the Emperor Galba (AD 68-9) that he was “omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset”, that is, by general agreement, capable of the imperial office, if only he had never held it. Churchill turned that on its head, having made people believe he was quite incapable of it. Jeremy Hunt? He may join a long list of would-be leaders whom academics and writers will ponder at length and set against his rivals and contemporaries, of whom we shall never know the truth, but who might well have followed the well-trodden path of Galba.
Eliot, I enjoy your historical surveys with their unexpected nuggets of information (e.g. Andrew Marr was a Maoist at university!) but dragging the Virgin Mary into a column on Winston Churchill and Jeremy Hunt! WTF!
Tories are doomed and rightly so.
Theyve behaved appallingly.
Treated public with utter contempt.
Lab arent much better.
In England thats the end.
Other parts of uk have their own dynamic. And driven in part at least by different forces and pressures.
If Starmer gets in and luck is on his side, no more wars, pandemics or global recessions, and lab dont commit publuc sepuku again, he can be PM for two full terms. Not sure if lab is capable of doing that, its own internal divisions are suppressed in common goal winning power. Once in, the old splits will come to surface.