Boris Johnson’s recent woes have coincided with a renaissance for Jeremy Hunt, the man he pipped to the Tory leadership in 2019. The Surrey MP was quick to put in his letter of no confidence on Monday and has followed that up with a stinging rebuke today to Michael Gove over the Dunsfold drilling development. It follows a string of media appearances for Hunt to mark the release of his much-vaunted new book on how to fix the NHS.
Yet while the former Health Secretary now finds himself one of the favourites to succeed Boris Johnson, questions still remain about his role in the Covid crisis. Nadine Dorries has claimed that pandemic preparation during Hunt’s time in office was ‘found wanting and inadequate’; a charge that will no doubt be used against him repeatedly, should he make a leadership bid. There are also criticisms about Hunt’s enthusiasm for lockdowns, vaccine passports and mandatory jabs; few of which were shared by many backbench colleagues.
Hunt has (unsurprisingly) tried to distance himself from all this: appearing on GB News last month, he suggested that he never wanted any lockdowns at all. So it was with exquisite timing then that on Tuesday night Mr S encountered Mark Harper – lockdown-skeptic and head of the Covid Recovery Group of MPs – at the Adam Smith Institute in Westminster. Speaking about the opposition movement he has led these past two years, Harper remarked dryly to guests that:
‘It fell to Steve [Baker] and I and a relatively small group of colleagues at the beginning – which got to be a large group of colleagues at the end – and interestingly everyone agrees with us now but they didn’t at the time.’
Who on earth could he be referring to? Afterwards Steerpike caught up with Harper as he took questions from guests and asked if he found it ‘galling’ to see Hunt now positioning himself as a liberty-loving lockdown-skeptic. The former Chief Whip replied that:
I don’t find it galling because I’ve yet to find anyone who believes him. When he made that point about not having any lockdowns, the clip of him saying that, someone posted it in our Whatsapp group and there was general pictures of laughing emojis and people going ‘lol’ – no one finds it credible. Everyone knows he was in favour of tougher lockdowns, he voted for every restriction the government put in place. He was still in favour of mandatory vaccination of NHS personnel, even after the government had dropped it, and then he said he was in favour of mandatory vaccination against flu, although he never actually found time to do that of course when he was actually the Health Secretary for six years. And his book about the NHS – I may be slightly old fashioned – but it just seems to me that if you’ve been the Health Secretary for six years, which is the longest time anyone has been Health Secretary since the health service was invented, maybe you should have done some of those things when you were the Health Secretary?
Ouch. Looks like that’s one name ruled out of the ‘Hunt for leader’ camp then.
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