Jeremy Hunt: A Conservative-Reform coalition is 'not going to happen'
In an interview on the New Statesman Politics podcast, the former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt dismissed his colleague Robert Jenrick's idea of bringing 'a coalition together' of Conservatives and Reform UK.
'It's not going to happen, because Reform's avowed mission is to destroy the Conservatives. So even if the Conservatives wanted to, Reform aren't interested,' said Hunt, who has written a new book about Britain's influence, Can We Be Great Again?.
'And I would put it differently, I think that the way that you win elections is by having solutions to the big problems that we face as a country that people think are credible and sensible and that you're actually going to deliver. And I think there is a massive gap in the market in British politics for a party that really does offer those solutions. I don't think with his £80bn of unfunded tax cuts, Nigel Farage is offering those solutions.'
When asked what direction the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch should be taking, Hunt – who has also served as culture, health and foreign secretary – argued it's time for his party to 'move on' from the election aftermath to coming up with policy ideas and solutions.
'I think the Conservative Party needs to move on from contrition – I mean, we had our worst ever general election defeat – to ideas and solutions, and that needs to be the next stage,' he said. 'I think [Kemi Badenoch]'s right that you had to have a period of, effectively, of silence. But I think now we need to move on and having recognised and licked our wounds for a bit, we now need to start to get out there, arguing for the solutions we believe in.'
For Hunt, the party's message should focus on 'economic competence' and target '30-something, 40-something, 50-somethings, young families with a large mortgage – that is a group no one is speaking to and that is where the Conservative Party should be addressing our ideas for the future'.
Having lost out to Boris Johnson in the 2019 Conservative leadership contest, and tried again in 2022, he said he didn't think he would be Tory leader, but didn't 'rule out serving in government in the future, if a future Conservative prime minister wanted my services'.
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As for rumours about his former rival's return to the helm, Hunt said: 'I just don't think we should be thinking the solution to every problem is to change our leader. That's not the way a grown-up party behaves. We have to concentrate on getting the substance right.'
Having served as health secretary in the austerity years, Hunt admitted 'some of the cuts went too far, for example on social care, which meant, in the end, a lot of NHS hospitals filled up because people couldn't discharge vulnerable and frail patients back into the community'.
He also confessed that 'we never trained enough doctors because no health secretary or chancellor particularly cared about whether we were training enough doctors, because it takes seven years, so this is really a debate about how many doctors the NHS has in a decade's time' – arguing that he 'finally put that right' when he was chancellor by creating a long-term NHS workforce plan.
You can watch the whole interview now on YouTube, and it will be available on the New Statesman Politics podcast on Monday 9 June.
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