Who voted for Jeremy Hunt to run Britain?

Jeremy Hunt has no mandate to lead Britain. He couldn’t muster sufficient Tory MPs behind him to properly enter the last leadership contest. He was beaten overwhelmingly in the one before that. 

He was a key part of the failed Theresa May administration that lost a parliamentary majority at a general election. He played no role in the Boris Johnson administration that won it back with plenty to spare (a victory from which the Conservative mandate to govern still flows).

Yet in a round of interviews this weekend, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer simply ripped up the economic agenda of Liz Truss. He mocked and then buried the PM’s vision of dynamic unfunded tax cuts. He pulled the rug from under her Commons pledge that the Government will not cut public expenditure. And Hunt made clear that he, rather than she, will decide on such matters as whether to stick with a promised reduction in the basic rate of income tax.

He was only in post because of mistakes that had been made, he added. All he would say in defence of his nominal boss was that she had won the Tory leadership contest ‘fair and square’ and therefore could not respectably be removed from 10 Downing Street absent a general election. Yet he did not even bother to pretend that the economic strategy he intends to impose requires her consent, let alone her active support.

Perhaps the calculation is that, given sufficient humiliation, even such an extreme case study of the Dunning-Kruger effect as Liz Truss has turned out to be, will realise that her reputation is being further depleted rather than enhanced by every extra day she chooses to cling on.

It is facile to complain that Truss is an altogether blameless victim of a shadowy financial establishment which holds illegitimate primacy over democratic outcomes. For a start, her own mandates are narrow and fragile: from her constituents in 2019 to be the MP for South West Norfolk and from 58 per cent of the Tory grassroots electorate to be their party leader. It has never been the popular will that she should be prime minister: that post depends on the consent of her parliamentary colleagues.

More pertinently still, private citizens and private concerns are not under any compulsion to lend their money to a government; and if they decide an administration is not a good bet they will naturally charge more to do so. If the administration in question cannot afford the bills then it must borrow and spend less or tax more. If it has promised not to do so then its authority will be shattered. These are basic laws of political gravity. Regimes which seek to defy them always come a cropper. No conspiracy required. So one should not weep for Truss. 

But a few tears for the overall standing of British democracy would certainly be in order.

The takeover of the levers of power by Hunt, who supported the defeated Rishi Sunak in the latter stages of the recent leadership race, certainly has echoes of the old Tory ‘magic circle’ method of selecting a head honcho. He may not have the air of the grouse moor about him, as was said about Alec Douglas-Home, but the patina of the standard issue Home Counties Cameronian centrist is unmistakable. 

On Friday, Nigel Farage claimed to have it on good authority that Hunt was returning from a mysterious trip to Brussels when he was confirmed as the new chancellor and mischievously asked in a tweet: ‘Had he taken any instructions?’

Lately, comparisons between UK politics and its traditionally chaotic Italian counterpart have been all the rage. We have clearly entered an era of Tuscan turnover in the Palace of Westminster. Or maybe that should be Sicilian snakes and Lazio ladders.

In which case it is hard not to see Hunt as our version of the former European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi, who was called in by Italy’s president to form a technocratic government after the collapse of a previous regime.

He’s on his way out now – getting replaced by a populist right-winger after the Italian electorate were allowed a say on the future direction of their country via a general election.

It is getting harder and harder to dispute that a fresh popular mandate to determine who should govern is needed here as well, less than three years after we last went to the polls. Brenda from Bristol will not be pleased, but another early general election is starting to feel inevitable.