Is Jeremy Hunt’s erratic, delusional leadership bid the stuff of strategic legend?

Is Jeremy Hunt entirely well?

I hate to be so indelicate and intrusive. But it’s increasingly difficult not to fret about the foreign secretary’s mental faculties.

He might be absolutely fine, and nothing more worrying for a potential prime minister than monumentally dim. It is even possible, as charitably acknowledged below, that he is a brilliant long-term strategist.

But on the surface – and with Hunt, is there anything else? – he would appear to be alarmingly confused.

Judging by Tuesday morning’s Today programme chat with John Humphrys, Hunt believes that he is campaigning for the leadership of a different country. He has some form in the field of geographical bemusement. You will recall that he referred to his Chinese wife, while in China, as Japanese.

Where he imagines he is today isn’t clear. It could be Denmark, the Netherlands or another of our more consensually minded EU partners. It might be the staid, sensible UK of the 1950s.

But it isn’t the Britain of now as it irreversibly heads towards the final showdown between staying in the EU and leaving without a deal.

There will be no splitting the difference. The European elections made this so crystal clear that the need to pick sides seems finally to be penetrating Jeremy Corbyn’s tungsten-plated stubbornness.

In Thursday’s double-pronged landslide for Nigel Farage and the Lib Dems, the middle ground vanished. This is a fight to the finish between extremes of roughly equivalent numbers and certainty.

Yet here’s Jeremy Hunt running for PM on the Fantasy Compromise Unity Gibberish platform.

He is determined, for example, to renegotiate the Irish backstop. Someone else wanted that. But “I want” never gets, as nanny used to say. On Friday, Hunt piously observed that it was not the time to talk about his candidacy, but to remember Theresa May. Also on Friday, true to his word, he announced his candidacy and forgot Theresa May.

He not only wants to renegotiate the deal the EU has collectively stated, time and again, with unmistakable sincerity, it will not renegotiate. He wants to do so with a crack new negotiating superteam that includes the ERG, the DUP and Scottish and Welsh “representatives”.

That isn’t a political ambition. It isn’t even blue sky thinking. It is the sitcom proposal you wrote at 3.30am after a bottle of vodka with absinthe chasers, and then binned during the first hangover pangs. (Pilot synopsis: when turbulence smashes the toilet door lock on the plane to Brussels, Arlene Foster faints from shock when she interrupts Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nicola Sturgeon snorting cocaine off the in-flight magazine.)

If Hunt endured the four-week wait for a GP appointment (and whose fault’s that?) and shared the details of his personal Brexit journey, the physician would order an MRI to rule out early-onset dementia.

In June 2016, four days after the referendum, he argued that any deal should be confirmed by a second referendum. Two years later he described a second referendum as “profoundly undemocratic”.

In July 2018, he said that crashing out of the EU would be “incredibly challenging economically”. In November 2018, he delicately nuanced that. The UK would “flourish and prosper”, he said, without a deal.

Last month, he said he’d vote for no deal over no Brexit. Today, he described fighting a general election on a no-deal prospectus as political suicide.

In fairness, there is one contentious issue on which he does know his own mind. Over the weekend Hunt revealed that his political hero (along, natch, with Thatch) is William Wilberforce.

Bravery isn’t necessarily a quality you associate with Hunt. There have been claims that he leapt behind a tree to hide from reporters when on his way to dinner with the Murdochs, whose aborted BSkyB takeover would fall under his remit as media secretary, at the time. But unequivocally coming out against slavery takes courage, of course.

And also in fairness to him, there is that slim chance that he is neither an imbecile nor the victim of a neurological disorder. In one circumstance, his latest volte face might be a cunning chess move, sacrificing his chance this time to increase it next time. In this scenario, he calculates that “I Told You So” will be the winning slogan when embracing no deal quickly does for Boris or whoever.

Unfortunately, that one circumstance involves being somebody other than the Jeremy Hunt whose job application relies on such a curious CV.

He brags about “outnegotiating” health service unions, as if the bullying of nurses and junior doctors is a vote-winner in a country united by absolutely nothing but its quasi-religious reverence for the NHS.

He says he wants to lower corporation tax to 12.5 per cent (the Singapore option) when the electoral appetite is palpably in favour of a government with the balls to force corporations to pay more.

He claims his entrepreneurial success uniquely qualifies him for the post. It’s true he made millions from an educational publishing firm, where one former employee remembers him ordering staff to turn down the radio to avoid disturbing the sales team one autumn day in 2001. September 11, to be exact.

It’s also true that other businesses failed, including one exporting marmalade to Japan. God knows why such an inspired idea didn’t work. Assuming Hunt is no more ill than he is a Machiavellian mastermind, but a bear of very little brain, my guess is he was as confused then as he is now, and sent the marmalade to China by mistake.