“I felt like I must be from another galaxy when I heard it,” Merve Topaloğlu says of the chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s suggestion that collecting £100,000 a year is “not a huge salary”. “I can’t imagine how anyone could say £100,000 is not a huge amount,” adds the 34-year-old former Turkish reporter, who runs the Journalist, a cafe on Godalming’s High Street right in the heart of Hunt’s Surrey constituency. “The annual profit from my whole cafe isn’t close to £100,000.” “Politicians like to tell us that they are in it with us,” Topaloğlu says. “But if he can say that, it shows he doesn’t know what life is like for many of us living on a lot, lot less than £100,000.”
Hunt, who has been the MP for South West Surrey since 2005, made the comments in response to a call from a constituent living in the market town who had complained that the government’s free childcare scheme was not available to families with a parent earning more than £100,000. “That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay,” the chancellor said on X. Opposition MPs, campaigners and pundits immediately criticised Hunt as being out of touch and pointed out that the average UK full-time salary, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), was £34,963 and anything higher than £81,357 put a person in the top 5% of earners. Estimates by the consultancy Electoral Calculus put the median salary in the constituency at £56,606, in Godalming (population: 23,000) the average is about £34,000, according to the town council.
When challenged further this week, Hunt said: “What sounds like a large salary – when you have house prices averaging around £670,000 in my area and you’ve got a mortgage and childcare costs – it doesn’t go as far as you might think.” Topaloğlu, and all of the more than a dozen people the Guardian spoke to on a visit to Godalming this week, agreed that Surrey was expensive. “But if it’s hard for people earning £100,000, how does he think it is for people earning a third of that – or less?” she adds. For many, the chancellor’s throwaway comment has fuelled the perception that, after 14 years in power, the Conservative party has drifted dangerously out of touch with most people. But it also spoke to concerns about the increasing unaffordability of housing.
David Johnson, 77, says that he can understand what Hunt is trying to say as “it is very expensive around here”. House prices, Johnson continues, are “absolutely bloody ridiculous, and no ordinary person would be able to afford them. “But they’re not for local people they’re for people from London or wherever. People not short of a bob or two. It does mean that it’s hard for people from around here to stay here.” The array of properties for sale in the local estate agent shows Johnson – and Hunt – have a point. Just out of town, a seven-bedroom house with a tennis court and swimming pool is on the market for £10m. It is in Enton, the neighbouring village to Hunt’s constituency home in Hambledon (one of a number of homes the chancellor owns with his wife, Lucia). Raymond Brown, 75, a barber who has lived in Godalming all his life and has worked at the same barbershop since his early 20s, says that in lots of ways Hunt is right.
“Property and things are very expensive, and you would need a large salary to pay the mortgage,” Brown says. “My granddaughter and her husband are struggling to buy a house, even though he has a very well-paid job. If they are struggling, what about the people on much lower wages, and there are a lot of them here.” Paul Follows, a county councillor who is standing as the Liberal Democrats’ parliamentary candidate against Hunt at the general election, says that while “people think of Surrey as this lovely rich leafy place, it also has areas of huge hardship”. “In many ways people on £100,000 could feel the squeeze as mortgage costs and childcare rise,” Follows says. “But someone on £100,000 has options that those on a fraction of that don’t. They are finding his statement deeply offensive. People are struggling to get by despite working hard.”
The pandemic and the cost of living crisis have “tipped people from just about getting by, to crisis point”, Follows says. “There are food banks in every town. It’s not what people might expect of Surrey, but they are desperately needed and their usage is increasing.” Hunt beat Follows by almost 9,000 votes at the 2019 election, down from a Tory majority of 21,600 in 2017. The constituency has been the subject to boundary changes and renamed Godalming and Ash, and some polls suggest that Hunt could become the first chancellor in modern times to lose at a general election. The Guardian revealed recently how Electoral Commission records show that he has given more than £100,000 to the South West Surrey Conservative Association over the past five years to bolster his chances of success. Karen Milton, the manager of one of the food banks, says the service began during the pandemic and was expected to be a temporary measure – “but actually, we have more clients now than ever before, and lots of our clients are working but their wages don’t cover their costs”, she adds. “We try not to ask too many questions, but volunteers provide an ear to listen and we know that many would be in really dire straits without the food bank. A lot of people have only recently accepted that food banks are needed. When we first started and were handing out leaflets in Waitrose, shoppers said: ‘Surely we don’t need a food bank here.’” Hayley Collier, who has come for her fortnightly appointment at the food bank in Godalming’s Ockford Ridge council estate, says that without it she would be “done, over”. “I wouldn’t be able to feed my children or myself properly,” says Collier. “I am on disability [benefit], so is my daughter, that only just covers rent and petrol. “I never have enough money. For him [Hunt] to say £100,000 isn’t very much is so disgusting and offensive. £100,000 would change my life; £10,000 would change my life.”