Jeremy Hunt's leadership claim shows a man grotesquely out of his depth

At any mention of Jeremy Hunt’s name, two images flash to mind. Passing delicately over the aural one (the mispronunciation for which Jim Naughtie will be most fondly remembered), we come to the visual: the amusing vignette of the shiny-faced lummox courageously leaping behind a tree in a futile attempt to hide from hacks while on his way to a secret dinner with Rupert Murdoch.

Back then, as Media Secretary, he was at the centre of controversy over the handling of Murdoch’s pursuit of a 100 per cent stake in BSkyB. For reasons wearily familiar to us all, that masterplan (though it may soon be revived) was foiled. Somehow – whether through the grandeur of his talent or his willingness to intercept phone-hacking bullets heading for David Cameron’s scrotum; it’s 10-11 the pair, and take your pick – Hunt survived. He prospered, in fact, and became Health Secretary. Promoting a man in the wake of the accusations of a News Corp “back-channel” of influence is one of the grubbier footnotes of Cameron’s premiership.

In his current post, Hunt has performed as any student of his work would have predicted. In place of any discernible strategic thinking as to how to maintain, let alone improve, the NHS, he pours his bespoke brand of bland, oily emollience on turbulent waters. He has a gift for projecting reasonableness. It is when this human sedative departs from a well-rehearsed script, as in Manchester this week, that he struggles.

On the fringe of the Conservative conference, he chose to speak about imminent cuts to working people’s tax credits, and almost philosophically about how “hard work” with no support from the tax system will liberate people from the vicious indignity (I paraphrase him slightly) of having enough money to live on. His panacea is for the British to work as hard as the Chinese.

You needn’t be clairvoyant to divine what, at a conference moonlighting as a beauty pageant for a coming leadership contest, drove him to stray from the usual smug plappings about how the NHS is in rude health. Evidently, feeling neglected with everyone fixating on George, Boris and Theresa, Hunt wanted to remind us that he is a player, too.

Before we go on, stringent fairness demands a few points be made in his defence:

1) Since Hunt has a Chinese wife, as he took the trouble to mention in his speech, he must know what he’s on about. Mrs Thatcher had a rugby union referee husband; who understood the sport’s cosmically arcane offside rules better than she?

2) Since Hunt did not specify which aspects of China’s hard-work culture he suggests for the British working poor, he cannot be accused of advocating they are forced to work sweatshop hours every day until they finish teething or succumb to an early death (whichever comes first)?

3) As a believer in homeopathy, he has every right to extend the faith (cobblers though it is) that nothing cures a disease like treating it with the same disease. In the unlikely event that he truly believes the solution to poverty is further impoverishing the poor by up to £1,300 per annum, let’s hope Iain Duncan Smith plays nice when the time comes to share the dunce cap around the Cabinet table. And:

4) Hunt claims he has been “wilfully misinterpreted” – a ploy that never fails the foreign Premier League star when his agent insists a disobliging quote about his manager was “mistranslated/taken out of context/blown out of all proportion”.

Now no one would deny that Hunt has utmost regard for the hard working. Take the junior hospital doctors under his watch. They work ridiculously long hours, often under colossal stress, and he shows nothing but respect for them. Which must be why they’re getting on so spiffingly at the minute.

And Hunt, to his credit, asks no more of the soon-to-be-poorer working poor than he asked of his IT-based PR firm’s staff. A former employee, one Luke Turner, has claimed that on 11 September 2001: “Now my memory tells me that it was Hunt who, when we were listening intently to the radio reports of planes smacking into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, came into the office to demand we turned the volume down because it was affecting the sales team’s telephone calls…” Isn’t that a work ethic fit for the sweatiest of Chinese sweat shops? And if there is one archetype from whom the very low paid yearn to be lectured about what hard work really means, it’s a guy who quickly made millions at the gruelling coal face of public relations.

In spirit, Hunt has never really given up his old trade. First spinning for Murdoch over BSkyB, now putting a gloss on a health system suffering for want (among other privations) of investment in GP numbers, he is the very model of the modern PR politician. If, in doctoring terms, he looks like a reassuring rural GP who’d be ever so gentle with you after snapping on the latex glove, that – as with everything else about Hunt– is too superficial. Politically, he is a cosmetic surgeon who sees his calling as putting the best possible face on the ugly.

At that fittingly shallow task, he has (until this junior doctor aggro) been adept. But as a political philosopher, staking out his leadership potential with clumsily implicit strictures about the self-esteem to be wrought from going hungry to feed the kids, he is grotesquely out of his depth. If Duncan Smith believes in the Big Brother paradox of “Freedom Through Poverty-Enslavement”, as he seems genuinely to do, that makes him the useful idiot of ideologue state-shrinkers.

Jeremy Hunt, who believes in nothing but his own advancement, is something worse. He is a cynical fool.