At the first three doors that Jeremy Hunt knocked on during his canvassing session in leafy Godalming earlier this week were voters who said they would back the Conservatives. The chancellor, looking a bit embarrassed, admitted that they were not representative of what his team have been seeing across this Surrey constituency, where his 8,800 majority is under threat from the resurgent Liberal Democrats. But at the fourth door, Tory voters Stephen and Caroline told him they felt it was time for change. “The Conservatives have had a good crack at the whip,” said Stephen. “Unfortunately I think they’ve lost their way.” Many in Westminster were surprised when Hunt announced that he would be running again, with former colleagues like Theresa May and Michael Gove having decided it was time to stand down after 14 years running the country. After almost 20 years in parliament and a string of senior cabinet jobs, including foreign secretary and chancellor, and with the Tories on course to lose the next election and with it swathes of constituencies – including his own of Godalming and Ash – some expected Hunt to retire from parliament. Yet he had no such plans. “I think I can hold it,” he said in an interview with the Guardian in the Inn on the Lake pub in the town. “But it’s going to be a very big fight, the biggest I’ve ever had.” Like many fellow Conservative candidates, Hunt is getting squeezed from both the left – with the Lib Dems on course to take the seat – and the right, from what he describes as “Boris Conservatives” who will presumably now drift to Reform.
Although he was at the heart of government throughout the austerity years, including as health secretary where he oversaw substantial real-terms funding cuts to the NHS, he was seen as a safe pair of hands when he was drafted into the Treasury after Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget. In a party that has drifted towards the populist right in recent years, this One Nation Conservative has come to be seen as an “acceptable face” of Conservatism on some parts of the left. But he rejects the characterisation. “It sort of suggests that somehow I’m window dressing for a bad cause, when actually I believe in Conservative values. The fundamental difference between Conservatives and Labour is that we don’t think Labour people are bad, we just think they’re wrong. “Whereas Labour people think that Conservatives are evil. That actually can be very poisonous in politics. I don’t think you should ever think of your opponents as evil because if you do that, then it precludes the possibility of debate and persuasion.” Hunt does not think, however, that the Tory party should pitch to the right as a result of Nigel Farage taking over Reform UK and announcing he will stand for parliament in Clacton, Essex. “The evidence of Britain is that elections are always won from the centre ground and I think in a two-party system that will always be the case,” he said. “We’ll always be a broad church and I think that’s a good thing.” He added: “I think there’s a massive disconnect between what the leader of Reform wants and what Reform voters want. The leaders want a Labour government, as a means to smashing the Conservative party. “Reform voters don’t want a Labour government in a million years. We have to point out to them that is the agenda of the people who claim to be leading them.” He had not heard rumours about possible defections from the Conservatives to Reform before nominations close on Friday. “I’m not expecting a call from Nigel,” he joked.
Hunt acknowledges that many voters have real concerns about immigration, but adds: “What is wrong is to say there is a simple solution. “When it comes to legal migration, it is coming down already massively … but I think all politicians in Westminster need to be honest about the very real concerns our voters have.” Brexit was a big issue in his constituency, which voted 58% to remain in the EU. Hunt said that it was a “blessed relief” that Brexit had hardly been mentioned on doorsteps this time round, and that while he lost voters in 2019 over the issue, local businesses were now most concerned about labour supply. “My view on Brexit is that it’s a choice, and it’s up to us. If we want to, I’ve always thought we can make a success of it. Round here, people are very focused on the needs of business,” he said. Hunt, as a multimillionaire, has in the past been accused of being out of touch with ordinary voters. He has donated more than £100,000 of his own money to his campaign. And he was criticised for suggesting that a £100,000 salary would not go as far as you might think in Surrey. He claimed his remarks, which were to a constituent during a surgery, had been “deliberately misconstrued”, and suggested that voters should look at his record as chancellor when he targeted tax cuts to the lowest paid and increased the “national living wage” to its highest-ever level. “I think my record is as someone who has been very conscious of people on lower pay,” he said. “It is true that there are families here who have a high mortgage and high childcare costs, who even on what would seem a very high salary in other parts of the country, find it tough going. “Round here, what people want is a Conservative who understands what life is like for people born on the other side of the tracks and I’ve always tried to be that sort of Conservative.”
Does he find the polls, which are predicting a Tory wipeout, depressing? “It’s a narrow path. We’re the underdogs. It’s really difficult,” he admitted. “But I think fundamentally people vote Conservative because they want a party that in exceptionally difficult situations will take the decisions necessary to get things back on track. “The way I look at the last 14 years is that we haven’t got everything right, but where there are difficult decisions we haven’t shied away from them.” Is there anything he would have done differently over that period? Perhaps not lost to Boris Johnson in the 2019 Tory leadership contest? “Yes, but I don’t know whether that would have been possible in the circumstances,” he said. He says he wishes he had scrapped national targets for the NHS, as state schools and the police don’t have them and he believes that in both cases the service received by the public improved. “When I was health secretary, I thought you’ve got to hit your targets before you abolish them, and if you abolish them before that, people will just say: ‘Oh, he’s getting rid of them.’ But the truth is, I think it just makes the NHS incredibly bureaucratic.” Hunt, who is spending the vast majority of his time in the constituency during the campaign, including doing his ministerial red box every day by email, is philosophical over the timing of the election, which some Tory MPs believe has backfired. “I don’t think it really would have made a very big difference when it was called. People want to make a choice and it was a very bold thing to say let’s get on with it,” he said. So what next for Hunt if he does lose his seat? “I don’t want to go back to the private sector, I’ve done my time there, I ran my own business, I had a ball when I was doing it,” he said. “But for me, I want to stay in public service. But it’s out of my hands now.”