Jeremy Hunt: loose cannon or deadly sniper?
The Slog examines what the Prime Minister’s enemies are up to, and concludes that Dave’s Doom is a certainty.
“What on earth was Jeremy Hunt, the extremely green Health Secretary, thinking when he casually revealed in a newspaper article this weekend that he would like the abortion limit halved to 12 weeks?” asked Emma Barnett, the Women’s Editor of the Daily Telegraph yesterday. The not terribly well reasoned rant that followed didn’t get anywhere near the political significance of his remarks. In fact it didn’t get to any point at all beyond ‘I’m a woman and therefore I can be as irresponsible as I like so there’, but that feminist pov was, I’m sure, not to be found anywhere in the head of Jeremy Riming-Slange when he made the comment.
Hunt didn’t casually mention anything. The interview took place 36 hours before a Conservative conference in which David Cameron will be fighting for his life. His ‘opinion’ was designed to present the Leader with a dilemma: ‘here’s something the Right Wing of the Tory Party is keen on doing, and I don’t want to because it will lose us votes’. Given that context, Cameo’s response was entirely predictable: he favoured a ‘modest’ reduction in the abortion time-limit, and Jeremy was “only expressing a personal opinion”.
Rather like the increasingly loathed Evangelos Venizelos in Greece, our Prime Minister seems completely deluded in relation to his standing in the country. He was on Marr last Sunday, and the tweets about his performance afterwards were seething with anger, disrespect, and insults from all shades of the political spectrum. His response to Hunt’s ice-pick between the shoulder blades was to offer us such obvious bollocks that we were reminded of just what a hermetically sealed bubble Number Ten becomes after only a short while. If the abortion debate is about anything, it is about women’s rights – and women taking responsibility for their actions. Abortion is available on the NHS, and the remarks were made by the man in charge of that NHS. Any clown – even an administrative featherweight like Jezzer – knows that, as Health Secretary, you can’t have personal public opinions about euthenasia, or nursing standards or abortion.
So what’s really going on here?
Having used Jeremy Hunt as a sword to help him live with Murdoch, David Cameron now finds that sword being employed by those who would like to see the PM die politically. Cameron’s problem at the moment is that, to become part of that quest, you have to form a queue.
We have the Barclay Brothers (owners of the Daily Telegraph) who have loathed the Coalition since Day One, and done their best to destabilise it at every turn. Their hero is Boris Johnson, and they are backing him to a degree that, I’d imagine, BoJo would not like to become public knowledge. The attempt to build the London Mayor into a messianic prophet is illustrated hilariously in today’s Torygraph, in a marvellous piece of puffery headlined ‘Tory Party Conference: hundreds of supporters queue to see Boris Johnson’, which gushes ‘His reception – in a city not noted for its Tory support – was more suited to a rock star than a politician, with crowds of passengers chanting his name at New Street station. At the conference centre, he was surrounded by a scrum of cameramen and photographers so intense that one was thrown to the floor and required medical attention.’ Later he fed 5,000 hungry unemployed using only five fishes, and told conference he would reverse Time itself in a bid to reinstate Grammar Schools. He is hotly tipped to be Father Christmas at Selfridges this year.
Much of this is wheels within wheels: Camerlot devotees in the Party have been quietly putting it about that their focus group research shows Boris ‘doesn’t play well north of Watford’. So now the Barclays ‘prove’ that he does actually play well in Birmingham. In turn, Boris’s personal invitation of Rupert Murdoch to be his guest of honour at the Olympics was designed to show the Westminster rank and file that he has the sort of clout necessary to win an election outright. His defence of the indefensible actions of investment bankers is in turn a nod and a wink to the wealthy that, under him, the game of Derivative Roulette would continue unmolested. Johnson uses his Telegraph column to tell the squeezed middle that he’s going to build affordable houses for them, and Grammar Schools where their children can be educated to a standard hopefully above that pertaining today. And his straight-talking, sense-of-humour, false self-deprecation personal act makes him a hero among many downmarket voters.
Boris Johnson is a cunning politico with a policy for everyone. But his medium-term problem is that he’s stuck in City Hall for the next three years…..allegedly. I don’t buy that myself (why peak when there are still 36 months to go? Who’d want to become leader 6 months before a crucial election?) but to many on the Tory Right it matters a great deal. And this is where Jeremy Hunt comes in.
Whether Boris likes it or not, Hunt has been worming his way around Newscorp for a long time. He also has some heavy-hitting backers in the Party: a mixed bag of traditional Tories – ranging from Virginia Bottomley to the musterious JHJ Lewis – who see him as the most likely person to deliver Dave’s head on a plate. There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind (and that of many others inside and outside Westminster) that Hunt and his chums have something pretty nasty on the Prime Minister. Cameron didn’t want to make little Jeremy Health Secretary, but he did – much to the chagrin of backbenchers more likely to favour Camerlot as a leadership cabal.
Those older Party backers themselves have very close links to some of the business sectors most likely to benefit from an ethics-free suit like Jeremy Hunt running things: education suppliers, private health insurers and suppliers, bankers, junk-food retailers, and property developers. Further, what many have failed to realise is that Hunt networked to great effectiveness among the international sponsors he dealt with before and during the Olympic Games. He too was on hand to shake Rupert’s hand as he left the site: but behind the scenes, Jeremy worked a lot of rooms.
The Johnson and Hunt camps are obviously not mutually exclusive. Indeed, some of them would regard a Johnson-led Tory Triumvirate of BoJo, Hunt and Gove as the ideal podium of runners after the 2015 Election: a gold-plated banking/investment fixer as PM, a private health fanatic as his Number Two, and a secret lover of Education sponsorship collecting the bronze medal.
It’s been my view for over 18 months now that, given the powers ranged against him, David Cameron cannot possibly emerge victorious. Ironically, the lull in the Newscorp storm of late is about to come to an abrupt end: the PM will be sucked into the various trials facing Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. So some of the ‘dirt’ the Hunters have on Dangerous Dave in the Hackgate arena may come out at a time that doesn’t suit their book…or Johnson’s. But one way or another, one or more of business looking for a stooge, media barons wanting a lurch to the Right, a recreational Hackgate scandal, poorly devised EU policy, a LibDem walkout, or the 1922 Committee is going to do for the Prime Minister.
I often hear observers opining that this won’t happen as long as Labour is in the lead, and the LibDems are flatlining in the polls. But those out to bury Caesar have a simple view on that one: get rid of the Camerlot flim-flam, and that lead will quickly reverse.
Hunt’s gratuitous abortion remarks and BoJo’s rock-star personality cult are just for starters. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The Slog 