Last week Jeremy Hunt became the fourth MP to hold the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer in as many months after Prime Minister Liz Truss sacked Kwasi Kwarteng, a close friend and ally during her leadership bid, in the wake of their controversial mini-budget unveiled last month. He was in office for less than seven days before Truss announced her resignation.
The market turbulence caused by Truss’ economic plan forced her to scrap some of its more contentious policies, such as the abolition of the 45% higher rate of income tax, and bring forward the date for costing outlines before ultimately deciding to remove her so-called political soulmate to keep her vision for growth in motion. Some have argued, however, that the new addition to Truss’ cabinet cast enough shadows over that vision to force Truss out of office.
Jeremy Hunt: A Credible Candidate?
Unlike many of Truss’ top team who had not touched the summit of British politics until the premiership of Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt is a face many will know. He served as Theresa May’s Foreign Secretary after Johnson resigned in 2018 and came second to him in the 2019 Conservative leadership race, launching another failed bid this year, but he is perhaps most recognisable for his six-year tenure as Health Secretary (the longest anybody has spent in the role in British political history) for both David Cameron and May.
Hunt’s plans for the NHS as Health Secretary were ambitious but his time in charge of it was marred by criticism for increasing privatisation and for his dispute with the British Medical Association over new contracts for junior doctors which led to the first junior doctors’ strike in over forty years. In the British public’s political consciousness, the image of Jeremy Hunt is not a particularly favourable one, though he was seemingly brought in by Truss to shore up the confidence of the markets.
Hunt is undeniably a more experienced politician than most of the Truss government, having served in cabinet uninterrupted for nine years and chairing the Health and Social Care Select Committee since January 2020. His political stances are less overtly right-wing than Kwarteng or Truss and, interestingly, he endorsed Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership election after his own bid failed. Hunt is a break from the Johnson-era tradition of filling a cabinet with loyalists, but it’s clear that Truss’ hand was forced into choosing him. What other recognisable MP with government experience could she have realistically called upon in Hunt’s stead? It’s unlikely Sunak would have returned her call.
Truss was PM, but Who Had the Power?
During her marvellously short press conference announcing the changes in economic ministers and policies, Truss was dogged by questions regarding her own fate and standing as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party – why should Kwarteng go for implementing her financial plan? How could Tory backbenchers have any confidence in her? How are her augmented policies legitimate given that she did not run on them in her leadership bid? She answered a few in a roundabout way before ducking back into Downing Street’s offices. Her demise a week later had a certain inevitability to it given how this conference went.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today the day after his appointment, Hunt admitted that mistakes had been made in the original mini-budget which he planned to “put right” and warned that some taxes would have to rise while others would not be cut by as much as was originally announced. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg wrote that Hunt had “comprehensively ditch[ed]” the economic strategy Truss had run on in the summer election and made it impossible for her to keep to many of her campaign promises, including cutting public spending. Truss may have officially been sitting in the driver’s seat, but Hunt seemed to be single-handedly steering the government’s vehicle away from its planned destination. A car crash of dramatic proportions was expected by many, and soon we got one.
Hunt has had little time to prove himself in his new role, given that he will probably be out of the Treasury by the end of next week, but his sobering words and reversals of fortune set him apart from the ambitious cost-cutting schemes promised by Kwarteng on 23 September. Had he not immediately ruled himself out of Conservative leadership upon Truss’ resignation announcement, many would have been looking to him as a successor who had already been guiding the government for the past few weeks. Truss had unwittingly fashioned herself into a flagrant U-turner during her premiership so Hunt’s stable economic plan seemed impressive by comparison – indeed, it would’ve been difficult for him to make the situation any worse. If Truss appointed him in the hopes of restoring credibility to her ministry, it clearly didn’t work out.
The End of the Line
It is rather ironic, given Truss’ penchant (borrowed from her predecessor) for putting close friends and supporters in high office during her short-lived premiership, that appointing a man who supported Sunak in the leadership election arguably spelled the end of her time as PM. While the chaotic events of the night before her resignation certainly had a more overt influence over the picture of her inability to control her party, Truss’ economic policy was crushed under Jeremy Hunt’s boot the moment he took office and completely undermined her authority within government. As MPs look for a new figurehead among the current cabinet and former Prime Ministers, it is rather remarkable that the one man who was described as “de facto Prime Minister” upon becoming Chancellor, who has run for Tory leader twice in the last three years, is not even entertaining the idea of replacing Truss. He ended her premiership in a single blow by doing what he could to reverse the chaos of the mini-budget, but doesn’t want to clean up the debris of the Conservative Party. Given the public’s exhaustion with the impotence of the Truss government, perhaps that’s not so surprising after all.