Jeremy Hunt’s promising path as Health Secretary

When Jeremy Hunt became Health Secretary last September, the Google Alert I set up against his name would spew forth a regular stream of contemptuous comment on the new appointment. Invariably accompanied by an unflattering photo – quite often that one (above) where Hunt arrives in Downing Street looking less ready for a Cabinet meeting than as the stand-in children’s entertainer – the pieces conformed to an ordained boiler-plate. They would focus either on his Murdoch-stained record in office, or on the certainty that he was about to privatise the NHS out of existence or, failing that, on the general observation that here was another public school twit, capable of getting lost in the back of his own ministerial car. The best-crafted ones managed to combine elements of all three.

Today, however, Hunt’s media profile is rather different. The Google Alerts now tend to point in the direction of things the Health Secretary has said or done and less towards the achingly predictable reflexes of the NHS establishment.