While Jeremy Hunt runs for PM, who is our foreign secretary? So much for ‘global Britain’

The UK is preparing to rebrand itself “global Britain”. It wants to show that it is open for business and open to the world. Once the constraints of EU membership are removed, the opportunities to spread our wings and rule the waves again will be boundless – or so we are being told. To that end, the foreign secretary – the UK’s chief diplomat – is glad-handing a stream of foreign visitors here and meeting counterparts abroad in an effort to put the country back on the international map.

Except that he isn’t, is he? For the past few weeks and at least the next three, that is not what he is doing at all. He is spending most of his time running – we seem to have adopted the US terminology for this contest – for the Conservative Party leadership, and if he wins, he will also be the next prime minister.

This is why the people he is currently glad-handing are the party members who have a vote in this particular election, and those likely to influence them, and why the world he is travelling stops, for the time being, at our national borders. What is more, he may never return to the Foreign Office full-time. If he wins, he will move into Downing Street; if he loses, the likelihood is that he will either be out of government or assigned another portfolio.

Nor is it the case that the prime minister will, or can, step in temporarily to cover for him. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair might have presided over a migration of authority over foreign policy away from the Foreign Office to No 10, but neither David Cameron nor Theresa May showed much appetite (or aptitude) for foreign policy, and anyway, May has been a lame duck since she was strong-armed into announcing her resignation. Her recent sorties – to Brussels for the latest EU gathering last week, and now to Osaka for the G20 summit – are at best swansongs, occasions for kind words and regrets, and perhaps a little fence-mending, as with her scheduled meeting with Vladimir Putin in Japan.

In reality, UK foreign policy, along with Brexit, is in limbo, awaiting the arrival of a new prime minister and a new government. At the very point, it seems, when the UK needs to be making its presence felt both in Europe and further afield, the prime minister is hors de combat and the foreign secretary is otherwise engaged.

Jeremy Hunt might object that he is, in fact, keeping a close eye on his office, perhaps even that, as the “entrepreneur” he prides himself in being, he knows all about multitasking. As if to underline that point, he advertised this week – via Twitter – for Foreign Office recruits from other walks of life, even giving details of how to apply.

The difficulty for the UK is that the world beyond Whitehall is not waiting for the denouement of our political drama. Squaring up for a fight with Tehran, the US came within 10 minutes – or so Donald Trump said – of launching airstrikes on Iran. The UK finds itself marooned between Washington’s aggressive, but mixed, messages and the EU’s hope of keeping the nuclear agreement with Iran going. At a time of such high stakes, it has just dispatched a Foreign Office minister to Iran who has been in the job less than two months. There is a palpable decline in the UK’s influence. It lost a vote in the UN on the Chagos Islands, and failed to stop Russia regaining its voting rights in the Council of Europe. Who currently speaks for Britain?

Given the protracted nature of the Conservative leadership contest, might it not have made sense for the prime minister to have nominated a stand-in for Jeremy Hunt, once he had reached the run-off and national campaign stage? His opponent, Boris Johnson, has no competing claims on his time, having left the government a year ago.

Now it might be that Jeremy Hunt considers his position as foreign secretary (and the contrast it invites with Johnson’s divisive tenure) as an asset in the leadership race. But however competent and organised he might be, it is hard to believe that he can combine the demands of his job as foreign secretary with touring the country and “selling” himself as the next prime minister. The same would have been true if another senior minister, say the home secretary, Sajid Javid, had made the run-off. The sheer length of the leadership contest leaves a gap in responsibility that needs to be filled.

The timetable is worth repeating: we are about to enter the fourth week of the campaign – a campaign that had anyway begun long before it was announced – with the voting not due to close until 22 July and the result to be announced the next day. There are then just three days of parliamentary business left before MPs rise for their summer recess.

Compare this with the minimum four-week notice for a general election. Why on earth should any party leadership campaign be longer than this? It certainly complicates things that the contest is, in effect, not just for party leader, but for prime minister. But it is surely worth asking why – in this day and age – the candidates need to travel the length and breadth of the land, why there need to be multiple hustings, and why the votes have to be on paper and physically counted.

Both candidates are essentially running a national campaign, and both have track records that can be judged by voters already and form the basis of questions and comment. Let’s have televised debates, with live audiences, by all means, and in-depth interviews and phone-ins. Let social media play its part. But, with a more concentrated nomination process, and less – but enough – local campaigning, and electronic voting, could it not all have been done and dusted in a couple of weeks, with the new prime minister in place by now?

There was a time when Conservative MPs elected a new leader among themselves and reverting to that method would certainly shorten the process. But the main criticism this time has been the fact that a tiny, self-selected part of the population – around 160,000 members of the Conservative Party – will essentially be electing the UK’s next prime minister. This is far from being the only, or the biggest, defect, however, and it could be remedied by a timely general election.

At least as big a problem is the way the contest is excluding everything else from political life. At a time of high international tension and with no Brexit deal in sight, not only do we hardly have a prime minister – given that her remaining time and authority are fast running out – but we hardly have a foreign secretary with his mind on the job either. And whatever time and opportunities are lost now may never be recouped.