Jeremy Hunt, the former Conservative chancellor who pulled the UK back from the brink after Liz Truss’s “mini” Budget, has urged Britain to end the “self loathing” and start feeling confident about the future.
Hunt said Rachel Reeves, his Labour successor as chancellor, had been too gloomy and had fuelled a mood of “declinism” but he said Britain was strong in key growth sectors and should stop talking itself down.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Hunt also rejected the idea that Britain’s government was broken, or that civil servants were — in Sir Keir Starmer’s words — “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
He said Treasury officials had reacted bravely and tirelessly to a series of economic crises — including Truss’s self-inflicted “mini” Budget debacle. “There was no sense of a blob,” Hunt said.
Hunt, a former foreign secretary, cites a conversation he had with Henry Kissinger, who said: “The biggest challenge facing democracies like the US and the UK is our self doubt, bordering on self loathing.”
“When you look at the sectors that are going to grow fastest this century, it’s often in services, tech, life sciences, where the UK is really strong. It’s really important to talk up our strengths if we want people to invest here. People have to see we’re confident in ourselves,” he said.
Hunt, a defeated chancellor, sounds in many respects more positive about the economic outlook than Reeves, partly because he insists the economic inheritance he handed to Labour wasn’t as bad as she claims.
He remains on good terms with Reeves, even if she accused him after the election of lying about the state of the public finances, a claim he rejects. His advice to her is to be bold and “be positive”.
Hunt added: “She has five years with a huge parliamentary majority and this is the time to make big reforms to planning, devolution, NHS.”
Rather than seeing the Truss “mini” Budget as a sign of institutional failure, he said the civil service responded decisively in its aftermath and had also taken bold steps after the global financial crash and in the Covid pandemic.
“When the markets are in freefall, there is no politics,” he said, referring to the dramatic days in the autumn of 2022. “The political and economic interests are 100 per cent aligned.”
Hunt recalls how Truss texted him while he was on a short break in Brussels to ask him to become her chancellor after she sacked Kwasi Kwarteng. “I thought it was a hoax,” he said.
“When I finally got through to her and was appointed, I saw the civil service at its absolutely superb best.
“I had a team of Treasury officials in the middle of a crisis and they weren’t just prepared to speak truth to power but they were honest and open about the risks and trade offs of any course of action.
“I was terrified but they must have been pretty terrified too because they had a complete rookie chancellor.” Even if Truss subsequently insisted the economic establishment ganged up against her, Hunt said that at the time “she backed me in every difficult decision I had to take”.
Hunt, who narrowly held on to his Godalming and Ash seat at the election, said that by the time the Tories were ejected in July the economy was growing at the fastest rate in the G7 and inflation was down to 2 per cent.
“I don’t think the shock treatment I administered the British economy was the reason why we lost,” he said. “We’d been in power for 14 years and we’d lost people’s trust in other ways.”
Reeves, however, claims Hunt handed her “the worst economic inheritance since the second world war”, with underfunded public services and a fiscal hole. She blames the Tories for the “huge” task of turning the economy around. Growth has stagnated in the second half of the year, with inflation ticking up to 2.6 per cent.
Having survived the Tory meltdown in July’s election, Hunt is writing a book about whether Britain is “finished as a country or have we got much better prospects than people think”. He believes the latter is true.
He said he did not accept the prevailing narrative “that we’re a country in decline with an economy trapped in low growth and a governing class and administrative class unwilling to take the tough decisions to get us out of it”.
But the 58-year-old added he is not looking to return to frontline politics, even if Kemi Badenoch were to stumble as Tory leader.
“Those days are over,” he said. “I’m happy to rule out standing for the leadership. I’m actually very happy — those jobs are thrilling, but they aren’t fun.”
