Sir Jeremy Hunt says a ‘dangerous world needs Britain’ (Image: Tim Merry/Staff Photographer)
Britain has been “down in the dumps” for too long and it is time for us to “get our mojo back”, according to former Chancellor and Foreign Secretary Sir Jeremy Hunt. The 58-year-old father of three is so excited about the UK’s potential he has written a book: Can We Be Great Again? His answer to this question is an emphatic Yes.
This admiral’s son also sees a clear way forward for the revival of the Conservative party. He wants Tories to reach out to pensioners who backed Reform and to the “hard-working class” – parents with heavy mortgages whom he claims are ignored in modern politics.
Sir Jeremy relishes a challenge. In 2022 he accepted then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’s invitation to serve as her Chancellor in the wake of her “disastrous” mini-Budget.
He was on a Eurostar getaway in Brussels with his wife, Lucia, when Ms Truss sent him a text asking to speak with him. He assumed this was a hoax and went and had French toast for breakfast before being assured by Downing Street that, yes, the PM wanted him on the line.
Jeremy Hunt and his family leaving Downing Street after Labour won the election (Image: Getty)
The experience of staring into a £72billion black hole in the heart of the national finances has not shaken his confidence in Britain’s potential. The moment you step into his corner office overlooking the Thames you are hit with a blast of optimism.
This is a man who defied expectations and held onto his Surrey seat by 891 votes. He wants to do more than rescue the economy and his party from disaster – he wants to see greatness restored.
The cover of his book features a tortoise with a Union Jack painted on its shell.
“What this symbolises to me is British durability because tortoises are some of the toughest, longest-living animals on the planet and there’s a solidity there,” he says. “But also there’s a need for us to get out from our shell.
“I think we have been down in the dumps for too long as a country and I want us to get our mojo back.”
The country needs to ditch a narrative of decline which he insists is “completely unjustified”. He says we must stop “comparing ourselves to the Britain of 100 years ago” when we were “top dog” and “controlled a quarter of the globe through the British Empire”.
At a time of international peril, he argues, the world needs a strong and confident Britain.
“[We] are the top military in Europe, we have the top universities in Europe, we have the top tech sector in Europe,” he says. “We’ve more hard power and more soft power than any other European country and I think it’s time we started recognising that in a dangerous world countries with influence need to use it.”
In his early 20s he lived in the Japanese city of Nagasaki and he was surprised when it seemed everyone he met said: “You’re from Britain – you must know Thomas Glover.”
Back in 1865, the Scottish merchant Thomas Blake Glover brought a steam locomotive to the city – an event which caused excitement throughout this country which one day would be famed for its bullet train – and people are still talking about it.
“This is Britain at its finest,” Sir Jeremy says. “I hope we will always continue to pursue our global vocation.”
He has no time for pessimists who think Britain is “finished”, saying: “Economists say that at the end of the next decade we’ll still be the sixth largest economy in the world. In fact, we’ll have closed the gap with Germany and Japan and pulled further ahead of France.
“I don’t want to pretend we haven’t got problems but let’s stop saying we can’t sort them out – of course we can.”
Rachel Reeves’s opportunity: ‘If anyone can take difficult decisions on things like welfare reform, it is this Government now’
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt during the State Opening of Parliament (Image: Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)
One of the top problems he worries about is Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to hit employers with a hike in National Insurance Contributions. He rejected this option while trying to rescue the national finances in his first days as Chancellor because he “needed the economy to grow”.
“The increase in employers’ National Insurance is catastrophic for business investment, for employment,” he says. “If Rachel Reeves reformed welfare so that our working age benefit bill was pre-pandemic levels – just going back to what it was five years ago – we would reduce the welfare bill by £49billion a year.
“She could have avoided all those employers’ National Insurance increases, she could have found more money for defence and the economy would be growing faster.”
He says his “biggest disappointment” with Labour is “the way they are ducking welfare reform”. It is unlikely that the Chancellor will call him for advice as she puts the finishing touches to her spending review, but he argues she is uniquely placed to take tough decisions which can put the country on the path to long-term prosperity.
“We have a Government with a big majority, four years left in its mandate,” he says. “If anyone can take difficult decisions on things like welfare reform, it is this Government now.
“If they do that they can avoid growth-destroying tax rises, they can find more money for defence and we can get the economy growing and that’s what we need to see.”
‘Cnservatives need to win back pensioners lost to Reform UK’
Sir Jeremy Hunt wants a more nimble NHS (Image: Daily Mirror)
The most recent Techne poll puts Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in first place on 31%, ahead of Labour (23%) and the Conservatives (17%), who are only just ahead of the Liberal Democrats (15%).
Sir Keir Starmer has taken to comparing Mr Farage to Sir Jeremy’s old boss, branding the Reform leader “Liz Truss 2.0”. Sir Jeremy is unimpressed by the Labour leader’s efforts to stamp out support for the start-up party, describing it as a “demeaning spectacle”.
He says: “We need leaders focused on the country’s problems, not on their party’s problems. The way Keir Starmer will stop support ebbing away to Reform is if his Government pulled its finger out and started finding solutions to some of the problems we face.”
And here is spies an opportunity for the Conservatives. He claims there is a “football pitch-sized gap in politics at the moment for a party which is offering solutions”.
Looking to the next election, he says: “We need to make sure that we are talking to the people we want to win back. I think there are two groups of people we should be thinking about.
“First of all, the pensioners we lost to Reform. We need to say to them Nigel Farage is a compelling personality but he ain’t offering solutions.
“And the other group of people are 40-somethings, 50-somethings, people with a young family, with a large mortgage – the aspirational hard-working classes. There is no party speaking for that group in British politics and that is core territory for the Conservative party.”
He made a fortune as a entrepreneur, co-founding a company publishing directories of university courses. But despite his business background, he does not think it is time for a deal or a merger with Reform as the two parties compete for the same centre-Right market share.
“I don’t think so because Reform’s stated aim is to destroy the Conservative party,” he says.
Boris Johnson beat Sir Jeremy Hunt in the race to lead the Conservatives (Image: Getty)
This former president of the Oxford University Conservative Association is not finished with politics.
Despite running against Boris Johnson for the Conservative leadership in 2019 and trying again in 2022, he says that if he returns to Government it “won’t be as prime minister”. But he is deeply concerned by threats facing the UK at home and abroad and clearly enjoys his new backbench freedom to speak out.
His time as Health Secretary has convinced him the NHS needs radical reform.
“I think the NHS has just become too big to manage efficiently and because it is all run from London it’s run on the basis of these big national targets and frankly there are so many targets in the NHS Stalin would be proud,” he says.
The “housing crisis” is also a major concern and in his lush Goldalming and Ash constituency he makes the argument there must be homes for “police officers, teachers and nurses”.
He is passionate about getting working age adults back into jobs, especially if they have been signed-off on benefits.
“If we are to pay for pensions, the NHS, the armed forces, we need to get as many of the workforce into work as we possibly can,” he says.
As he has shown throughout his career, he is energised by challenges that would have other people clutching their head in their hands.
In he postscript to his book he has a message to his children: “I love you to bits so please don’t go into politics.” But you get the sense that if a future Prime Minister interrupts a holiday with the offer of helming a great office of state this political action man would jump at the opportunity.
After all, how often do we get a shot at greatness?
Better Bones for a Better NHS
The Sunday Express won commitments from Labour and the Conservatives ahead of the last election to roll-out “fracture liaison services” across the nation so osteoporosis will be diagnosed and treated at the earliest opportunity. Our Better Bones campaign is keeping up the pressure on Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting to deliver on his promise.
Former Tory Health Secretary Sir Jeremy Hunt said: “What I would say to Wes Streeting is if you want to stop hospitals being full up with people who don’t need to be there, then prevention is the name of the game. Preventing fractures, preventing falls is one of the cost-effective ways of keeping older people out of hospital.
“The problem is when an older person goes to hospital they tend to stay a very long time. I hope it doesn’t take him as long as it takes many health secretaries the importance of prevention.”
