In January this year, Jeremy Hunt’s days as health secretary appeared to be numbered. He walked into Number 10, his regular NHS pin badge missing from his lapel, as rumours swirled that he was facing demotion to the business department. Two hours later, he emerged from his meeting with Theresa May not only still in post, but with a beefed-up brief to cover social care.
Now Hunt has secured a funding boost for the NHS well beyond expectations, and has become the longest serving health secretary in history. His longevity is so remarkable that even May has taken to teasing him about it. At a journalists’ dinner earlier this year, she joked that if Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister she would be “breaking rocks in John McDonnell’s re-education camp … But of course, Jeremy Hunt would still be health secretary.”
Q&A What are the financial pressures on the NHS that have built up over the last decade?
Between 2010-11 and 2016-17, health spending increased by an average of 1.2% above inflation and increases are due to continue in real terms at a similar rate until the end of this parliament. This is far below the annual inflation-proof growth rate that the NHS enjoyed before 2010 of almost 4% stretching back to the 1950s. As budgets tighten, NHS organisations have been struggling to live within their means. In the financial year 2015-16, acute trusts recorded a deficit of £2.6bn. This was reduced to £800m last year, though only after a £1.8bn bung from the Department of Health, which shows the deficit remained the same year on year.
Hunt’s renaissance has been a triumph in its own right. But it has also led many observers to ask if the MP for South West Surrey has an even bigger job in his sights. With the funding battle behind him, few Conservatives would be surprised if Hunt’s ambitions turned from the health service’s future to his own – in No 10.
“He’s on manoeuvres, there’s no doubt,” one senior backbench MP said. “The question is how far he is really prepared to push it.”
Even those outside of his party acknowledge his ascendancy. “Jeremy Hunt is in a very powerful position now, the only question is how much he chooses to deploy that power,” his former Lib Dem junior minister Norman Lamb said. “He is the great survivor. He has a skill for seeing off political disasters.”
Lamb said Hunt now felt far more confident to make spending demands public. “We all know it’s pretty much impossible to get sacked these days so he can choose to be much more vocal about it,” he said. “Ultimately, it doesn’t go far enough, there’s no certainty about where the money is coming from and it does all feel quite fragile, but it is a significant shift.”
NHS bosses who until recently viewed Hunt with disdain are now full of praise for his dogged, and ultimately successful, campaign to be the first public service to be taken out of the austerity straitjacket. David Nicholson, the former NHS chief executive in England, tweeted some personal praise – “Longevity has its benefits.”
“I’m not usually Hunt’s biggest fan but he’s played a bit of a blinder, you have to say,” a senior NHS official said. “When May came into No10 in 2016, she was very hostile to the NHS, so for Hunt to win her round was remarkable.”
His friends say Hunt, whose NHS lapel pin is firmly back on, is “genuinely passionate” about getting the right resources for the NHS.
Q&A Does the UK have enough doctors and nurses?
The UK has fewer doctors and nurses than many other comparable countries both in Europe and worldwide. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Britain comes 24th in a league table of 34 member countries in terms of the number of doctors per capita. Greece, Austria and Norway have the most; the three countries with the fewest are Turkey, Chile and Mexico. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, regularly points out that the NHS in England has more doctors and nurses than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. That is true, although there are now fewer district nurses, mental health nurses and other types of health professionals.
NHS unions and health thinktanks point out that rises in NHS staff’s workloads have outstripped the increases in overall staff numbers. Hospital bosses say understaffing is now their number one problem, even ahead of lack of money and pressure to meet exacting NHS-wide performance targets. Hunt has recently acknowledged that, and Health Education England, the NHS’s staffing and training agency, last month published a workforce strategy intended to tackle the problem.
An ally of Hunt, who saw the negotiations with Hammond up close, said: “For Hunt, this was not about helping the NHS but also about his moment in history. If it had been only 1.5%, he would have walked. Now he’s going to be the health secretary at the NHS’s birthday and is the one who has taken the NHS out of austerity.”
One of the health policy experts Hunt used to help him build his case was struck by how some of those around him saw him winning £20bn more for the NHS as, in part at least, also his pitch as a potential future Tory leader.
“Brexit’s paralysis of most normal government business means few ministers are actually able to get anything major achieved in their areas. In a future leadership contest, Hunt will be able to say ‘I saved the NHS’, which is no small thing,” he said.
Hunt seriously considered a bid for the leadership in 2016 after David Cameron stood down but did not have the support to mount a realistic bid, having taken a daily battering for his handling of the junior doctors strikes. He was a vocal supporter of remain during the referendum but two years of EU negotiations later, Hunt told LBC he was now a Brexit convert, because of the “arrogance” of the EU Commission’s approach.
A number of Conservative backbenchers said they had begun to see him as a more plausible “unity candidate” than many of his main cabinet rivals.
Tory MPs said they understood Hunt would be highly unlikely to challenge May and would only consider a run should a vacancy arise. One source said Hunt was effusively supportive of May in front of colleagues at cabinet. “He spends a lot of his time saying how great the PM is,” one cabinet minister said.
Several MPs have floated the theory that Hunt is now one of the two most plausible “born-again Brexiter” candidates, alongside new home secretary Sajid Javid.
“Jeremy’s stock is undervalued and Sajid’s is overvalued,” another Tory MP said. “Sometimes colleagues look confused when you mention his name, but that could be because they’ve never really thought about it, not that they are against it.
“You need to have someone who can expand their appeal. Jeremy has a lot of people you could potentially add to his tally, you can’t really say that about Sajid and you definitely can’t say that about Michael Gove.”
Embracing Brexit at this late stage is not a universally popular tactic, however. “To be honest, that actually makes me think less of him, not more,” one minister said.
Another move that has piqued colleagues’ interest is his emerging role as “minister for the Today programme”, a role once held by Michael Fallon, as the government’s most trusted attack dog. With Fallon gone, Hunt was the man sent out on the airwaves after the messy departure of Damian Green.
His main obstacle to Number 10, at least at an election, is his public image which he will hope the funding boost can repair.
As culture secretary, he only narrowly survived a Leveson inquiry examination into his relationship with James Murdoch. He is a multi-millionaire, made from the sale of the website he co-founded, Hotcourses, before making the leap into politics, and his finances have come under fire, most recently for failing to declare the purchase of seven luxury flats. His tenure in the health department saw the first strikes by NHS doctors in 40 years. .
There are tough battles to come for Hunt, especially on social care reform which may prove even more difficult given the Tories’ toxic “dementia tax” policy from the election. One Whitehall source said Hunt probably felt less personally attached to social care reform than NHS funding, but knew he needed to confront it.
Lamb said Hunt needed to prove he could be just as bullish on social care reform and funding. “He absolutely has to turn his attention to social care now. He has said it will need more money. But now they need to deliver.”
“He is a very, very ambitious man, but he does really care too about a properly funded NHS and he doesn’t mind if he has to carry quite a lot of shit to see it through,” the Whitehall source said.
“He has fought really hard for this victory and he now has that stable relationship with the health service. When you have that, it gives you space to start thinking longer-term.”