Jeremy Hunt’s fox hunting U-turn showed his charmingly boyish side – just like a kid with no attention span

What a shame this high-quality debate to see who becomes prime minister has only three weeks left to run.

When the Ancient Greeks came up with the idea of democracy, they couldn’t have imagined that only 2,300 years later we’d have perfected it to the point that our leader is chosen by 160,000 people representative of society, a wide cross-section of 98-year-olds from Wiltshire.

So yesterday Jeremy Hunt told us he wants to bring back fox hunting. Some people suggested this is because it might appeal to these voters.

But that seems cynical, although tomorrow, to fight back, Boris Johnson will support the sale of every wife in Britain in a market place, raising £2bn for water cannon for primary schools, then Hunt will retaliate with plans for compulsory Latin for parrots, Johnson will retort with any child who fails at maths having to fight a bear in a town square, and Hunt will demand the unemployed take jobs as garden furniture for landowners.

Hunt has said that leaving the EU will allow us to become a modern country taking modern opportunities, and fox hunting must be an example of the modern Britain he has in mind, in which we shake off the antiquated practices that have weighed us down, and instead dress in red tunics and smear fox blood on our cheeks while blowing a bugle as the fox’s liver is ripped out – because that’s what we did in 1456.

Hunt’s argument in defence of hunting was “it’s part of our heritage”, and it makes sense that if we did something in the past, we should keep doing it forever. For example, Hunt will now argue that as we’ve been members of the European Union for several decades, we must stay in it regardless of what public opinion says because it’s part of our heritage.

Then we can bring back other parts of rural heritage, such as going to the toilet through a hole in the floor of a castle into some mud, and holding trials by making a defendant eat a live squirrel. If they hiccough, they’re guilty and have to be strapped to the sails of a working windmill for nine years.

We can also discard the old-fashioned values imposed on us by Brussels that dictate we can’t sacrifice the mentally ill to the God of the Sun to make our harvests flourish, and we’ll be racing into the 21st century and overtaking Japan by Christmas.

It’s a sophisticated business winning the support of Conservative members. A survey this week showed 67 per cent of them believe parts of Britain are under sharia law, so the candidates could win extra votes by pledging to resist this sharia law, and outbidding each other by fighting other laws that don’t exist here.

Hunt can proclaim he will walk through Bristol town centre, despite it having become a no-go area for anyone who isn’t a lesbian.

Johnson can insist he’ll personally drive out the Vikings from Shepton Mallet to huge cheers at the hustings, and Hunt can stand on the battlements at Ludlow Castle shouting, “the Muslims who have taken over Shropshire say it’s now against holy law to put a spring onion up your arse. Well this is my message to them”, before shoving one up there.

The fox hunting issue became tricky for Hunt later in the day though, as he faced questions he couldn’t answer about his sudden passion for repealing the fox hunting ban. So he changed his mind and said there was no way hunting could be brought back.

This shows his human side, that he can develop a fad and abandon it within half a day, like a five-year-old who plays with a toy dustcart that makes a beeping sound, before losing interest and playing with a squeaky donkey instead.

Hunt expressed a similar boyish charm, screaming, “let’s get some dogs to rip a fox open, can we? Please, please, please?” but by 11am, he was bored with that and back to his old hobby of boasting about imaginary trade deals.

But he knows he has to catch up with Johnson, so as well as experimenting with mad policies, he might try to copy him in other ways. By the weekend he’ll have released a picture of himself as a student spraying champagne from a helicopter over a food queue in Ethiopia, then he’ll text a picture of his nuts to Angela Merkel.

But it all proves what an excellent system we have for choosing the country’s leader, that it’s decided by these 160,000 people. They should extend this system and give other similarly unrepresentative sections of society a go. The prime minister after next could be chosen by the 160,000 people who believe they saw the face of Jesus in a baked potato, with candidates on the Today programme promising to instal the potato into the roof of Canterbury Cathedral and order the archbishop to place fresh butter on it every morning in a ceremony overseen by the Queen.

The one after that can be chosen by the 160,000 people who only eat fallen fruit and after the 160,000 people who are scared of buttons. There might be a scandal at the hustings when one candidate wears a waistcoat with a button and 20 voters are trampled to death in the panic but it’s a price worth paying for true democracy.

For now, we must enjoy this wholesome contest between one candidate who says “f*** business” and another who makes his case by constantly staring into the middle distance wondering how to stand, like the most unconvincing shepherd in a nativity play. Aristotle would be proud.