Jeremy Hunt: ‘This lockdown just isn’t working quickly enough’

Jeremy Hunt cut a controversial figure during his tenure as Britain’s longest-serving health secretary. Reviled by junior doctors for his proposed reforms to their training contracts, he also won affection for championing patient safety from those who lost relatives in scandals such as Mid-Staffs, where many died as a result of substandard care.

He has undergone an unlikely transformation since his rival in the Tory leadership race, Boris Johnson, sacked him from the Foreign Office, refashioning himself into a critic of the government’s pandemic response as chair of the parliamentary health select committee.

He believes the government must do more to combat the more infectious variant of Covid-19 that scientists now also think may be more deadly. “Current lockdown measures are just not working fast enough,” he said when I spoke to him last week, pointing to data that suggests there may even have been a rise in the rate of infections in January.

He is calling for FFP2 respirator masks – which, unlike surgical or cloth masks, protect the wearer by filtering both the inflow and outflow of air – to be made compulsory on public transport and in shops. This would follow Austria and parts of Germany, where higher-grade masks have been made compulsory.

“Last time we waited too long before requiring masks,” Hunt says, “let’s not make the same mistake again.” He also thinks government must review whether the two-metre social distancing rule is sufficient.

He sees two sides to the government’s record: “You have to balance early failures with extraordinary success on the vaccine.” But the lack of financial support for people required to self-isolate has been a blind spot; only one in four people say they are complying, and the government has sought to dampen speculation that more support will be forthcoming. Hunt thinks this is a mistake: “We should say that we will simply make up any loss in salary if you’re asked to self-isolate. People need to know that they’re not going to be out of pocket.”

That wouldn’t come cheap, but unlike the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, Hunt does not cast himself as a fiscal hawk. “When the NHS was set up by Aneurin Bevan in 1948 we were even more broke as a country than we were now, but the government had the imagination to do something huge.”

Would Hunt would characterise himself more as a Blairite than a Johnsonite? ‘I think it’s too early to know what a Johnsonite is,’ he says

That might raise an eyebrow among Hunt’s critics: most of his time as health secretary spanned the tightest funding settlement of the NHS’s 70-year history. But Hunt points out he fought hard for a £20bn-a-year funding boost, awarded just before he moved on.

One of his big regrets, though, is that social care was not better protected from austerity. “It was the silent cut that people didn’t notice until too late,” he says. “You can’t possibly have a 1948 moment for the NHS without addressing the problems in social care.”

That would involve a more collective solution: “The fact that we treat people with dementia so differently to people with cancer is so immoral.” But it would require more of a safety net than a national care service: “It doesn’t mean you have to pay for it in the same way you do the NHS.”

Bevan is not the only Labour politician Hunt admires. “One of our greatest foreign secretaries was Ernest Bevin; I didn’t know when I first became foreign secretary quite how transformational he was.” Hunt believes there are lessons for modern diplomacy in the way Bevin stood up to Stalin, and his role in founding Nato. “China will soon overtake the US as the world’s largest economy, and democracy around the world is in an almighty mess. No one has got a plan to secure the future of open societies.”

He recently hosted a Chatham House event with Tony Blair on this subject. And Blair and Hunt have not been making dissimilar noises on the pandemic. Does he talk to him? “I’ve had conversations with him – he was the first person who understood we couldn’t directly copy what South Korea was doing on testing because we left it too late,” he says.

How do he and Johnson get on? ‘It’s pretty affable, actually. We exchange texts every now and then. It went through a period of froideur last year’

By this stage, I’m wondering if Hunt would characterise himself more as a Blairite than a Johnsonite. “I think it’s too early to know what a Johnsonite is,” he says. He talks of the “consensual figure” he worked with on the 2012 London Olympics, when he was culture secretary and Johnson was mayor of London. “That is a kind of figure I could happily support and could turn out to be a very transformational PM.” He views Keir Starmer as a threat, though: “He appeals to moderate people living in my constituency in Surrey in a way that no Labour leader since Blair has eversucceeded in doing.”

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Hunt’s relationship with the prime minister has evolved from cabinet colleagues to leadership rivals, to Hunt grilling Johnson in his role as a select committee chair. How do they get on? “It’s pretty affable, actually. We exchange texts every now and then. It went through a period of froideur last year when I was having to criticise some aspects of the government’s response. Because of the kind of conspiracy-theory world that No 10 always operates in, people start to ask: ‘Is there an ulterior motive?’ But I’m sure he’s spending a lot more time thinking about people in his cabinet than people he dispensed with,” he says with a laugh.

I get the sense he is enjoying his outsider role. “I have been able to speak independently on the big issues in a way you can’t as a cabinet minister,” he says. “As a select committee chair, I feel I can make more difference on big decisions than as a mid-ranking cabinet minister. But there’s a part of me that wants to finish off the things I didn’t manage to do as health secretary.”

That sounds like his leadership ambitions haven’t receded entirely? “I haven’t given them up, but I’ve found them ebbing over the last year as I’ve been spending more time with my family,” he says smoothly, ever the consummate professional. “I don’t rule out going back, but certainly not in the near future.”