Sunak was behind delay to NHS plan says Hunt as he fights to save his seat
Hunt's Godalming and Ash seat is a prime target for the Lib Dems and under threat from Nigel Farage's Reform UK party
The Conservatives’ general election campaign is in turmoil and yet Jeremy Hunt is a rarely on television or the radio.
But in true-blue Surrey, the Chancellor is everywhere – and for understandable reasons. Hunt’s political career hangs in the balance on 4 July.
His Godalming and Ash seat, remoulded by boundary changes, is a prime target for the Lib Dems and also under threat from Nigel Farage‘s Reform UK party squeezing the Tory vote.
Mr Hunt, who has already admitted he is just 1,500 votes away from losing the constituency, has been trying to win over the undecided in a series of 12 intimate local events organised across the seat. i attended one of them – a Q&A at Compton Village Hall on Friday – and heard a Chancellor who was prepared to blame the Prime Minister and criticise aspects of the Conservatives’ performance in government as he fought for his political survival.
He told voters that delays in the introduction of the long-term plan that Mr Hunt, a former health secretary, says is needed for the NHS, were down to Rishi Sunak saying “no”. He described the national targets for the NHS that the Conservative government had as a “bureacratic nightmare” Stalin would be proud of.
And Mr Hunt also criticised his current department, the Treasury, for being too focused on balancing the books at the expense of growth – “for many years”.
The news of his comments follows controversy over a newsletter sent to Mr Hunt’s constituents last week in which the Chancellor said that tax cuts would be funded by savings from an “enormous back-to-work programme (which I announced in the Autumn Statement last year)”.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said on Monday that this amounted to an admission that “the money that [the Conservatives] were pretending was available in their manifesto for their desperate policies is in fact money that’s already been accounted for”.
Mr Hunt is attempting to do everything necessary to be re-elected as an MP. The event i attended also saw him pledging to be “very active on local issues as well as national issues” as he sought to address concerns on speed cameras, flood defences and a bid to make the Surrey Hills a national park. The Chancellor made no bones about the fact that he is worried about losing the “very marginal” seat.
“There are lots of polls saying I will lose this seat, not all of them but a lot of them,” he said. “If I do lose this seat, it will be because a lot of people who supported the Conservatives in 2019 vote Reform this time.
“And what I would say is if you want Labour to have an even bigger majority, which I don’t know any Reform voters would want, if you want to have fewer MPs in parliament who want to control illegal immigration, if you want fewer MPs in parliament who want to bring down taxes then vote Reform, because that is going to be the impact.
“If the number of Conservative MPs goes down to 100, who is going to hold Keir Starmer to account? So I think there is a disconnect between what Reform voters want, which is not that, and what the leaders of Reform want, which is the destruction of the Conservative Party.”
Pressed by residents who wanted to know what Mr Hunt would do about Mr Farage in the remaining weeks of the campaign, the Chancellor simply replied that he was “knocking on doors six hours a day” and warning people voting Reform would be “bad for our democracy”.
This Q&A was being held just 24 hours after a YouGov poll showed Reform had overtaken the Tories in the polls for the first time and amid claims that Rishi Sunak and his inner circle had abandoned the idea of winning the election and instead pivoted their campaign to limiting the size of Labour’s majority.
Questions for Mr Hunt also turned to the bread-and-butter issues that will decide the election – the economy and the NHS – which was it became clear that the Chancellor seemed prepared to depart from the official Conservative position in front of a local audience.
“I think where the Treasury as an institution over many years has got things wrong is that they have tended to focus more on the balancing the books side than the growth side,” he said, stressing that Covid and the energy shock resulting from the Ukraine war had meant “tough choices” on issues such as inheritance tax.
Pressed on NHS waiting lists and how the Conservatives would deliver more doctors and nurses, Mr Hunt said failures on workforce planning had led to a lack of capacity in hospitals to meet demand. And he singled out Mr Sunak, suggesting he had hampered his efforts to tackle the crisis at an earlier stage.
“When I was chairing the health and social care select committee I lobbied in parliament to have a long-term workforce plan for the NHS that was scientifically saying how many doctors we’ll need in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years and said let’s start training them now,” Mr Hunt said.
“And I tried to persuade the chancellor, who was Rishi Sunak, and he said ‘no’ and then I became chancellor and he then said ‘yes’.” Mr Hunt then went on to advocate for new ways for under-pressure hospitals to “innovate”.
“The thing that I didn’t do is scrap all the national targets that we have, which are a bureacratic nightmare,” he said, adding: “I should say this is not the policy of the government – this is what I happen to believe.
“Stalin would frankly be proud of the number of the targets we have in the NHS and I think it is really holding us back.”
The bookies have made the Lib Dems favourite to take his seat and polling by 38 Degrees in March threw up some fascinating data about what people in the area think.
Offered a choice between more NHS spending and tax cuts, 67 per cent said boosting health spending funding while just 25 per cent said tax cuts were more important.
In the same poll, 35 per cent said they would vote Lib Dem in an election, compared to 29 per cent who would vote Conservative and 23 per cent who said Labour.
In a further sign of Hunt’s worries, he has contributed more than £100,000 of his own money to his local Conservative association to bolster his chances of re-election.
He was asked repeatedly about Brexit on Friday, with one man saying his export business has been damaged by new trade barriers, and another asking, bluntly: “If you lose your seat, will you consider joining the Lib Dems?”
“I don’t think [Brexit] has been a success or a failure,” Hunt answered. “I think it is a choice. When you become independent, what happens is you have a choice. It’s up to you.”
One member of the public was confused as to why Sunak was prepared to take Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights.
“I would love to find a way to stay in the ECHR but I think it’s going badly wrong at the moment,” Mr Hunt said. “We have an elected government that has passed three laws to try and get flights to Rwanda off the ground and it is incredibly difficult because of the actions of courts in this country who are effecting the principles of the ECHR.
“And so I hope the ECHR reforms because in the end I’m on the side of the voter who says it is the first responsibility of any government to secure out borders.”
Mr Hunt has held South West Surrey since 2005. But the new Godalming and Ash constituency created after the 2023 boundary review takes in parts of the North Downs and new communities such as Cranleigh and Shere, meaning it is less predictable for the Chancellor.
His Lib Dem opponent, Paul Follows is leader of Waverley Borough Council and is challenging Mr Hunt for a second time, having slimmed down his majority in the previous seat down from 21,590 to 8,817.
The council area voted 58 per cent for Remain and the Lib Dems’ pledge to rejoin the EU’s single market holds weight with some business owners in this comfortable, leafy part of the South East.
“I think the Liberal Democrats are basically the southern branch of the Labour Party,” Mr Hunt told voters. “They have a tradition that is different to the Labour Party, but that is what the Lib Dems have become. So they tend to be in favour of more state intervention, higher taxes in the way the Labour Party is.”
What Mr Hunt is telling voters behind closed doors suggests the Chancellor may be getting increasingly worried about losing his seat. But when i met his opponent Mr Follows for a coffee in Cranleigh high street, the Lib Dem seemed much more relaxed.
Softening Brexit and pledging to clean up Surrey’s waters have been core to his campaign to oust Mr Hunt. “We keep keep getting outages, we have repair works not done, upgrades not done and no investment,” he said. “We’ve also got lost sewage in the water.”
In the far west of the constituency, a number of children playing near the River Wey got sick and some water tests have found levels above what is considered safe for E-Coli.
“They’ve had to do things like cancel the charity duck race because they can’t have E-Coli-covered ducks come out of the water,” he said. “But it’s endemic across the constituency.”
Mr Follows appears confident because of the headwinds the Conservative Party is facing, which in Godalming and Ash includes an educated electorate familiar with tactical vote.
“Jeremy Hunt is in a bit of a bind, because the Conservatives are simultaneously being pulled in two different fundamentally incompatible direction,” he said. “You can’t be both Nigel Farage-lite and ‘Mr Moderate’ Shire MP in the South.
“So he has that slight problem. He is not moderate or progressive enough for people like me, and quite a lot of Green and Labour voters, but he’s not right wing for quite a lot of the other side. So he is going to get pulled on both sides.”
The Tory logo is barely visible on Mr Hunt’s signs or literature but having been a government minister four times over the last 14 years he may struggle to convincingly distance himself from the party’s brand.
Mr Follows also says constituents’ spiralling mortgage costs eclipse any savings from National Insurance cuts. But he says it is Brexit which is the issue that voters here return to.
“Jeremy Hunt actually was a Remainer, but among a number of things that he’s promised in public and then voted very differently in the House of Commons on is that he voted to take the hardest course possible on the single market,” he said.
“I can think of many people whose businesses and livelihoods have been entirely ruined by that decision and lots of them live here and remember.”
Meanwhile, voters i meet in the constituency had a number of long term gripes with the Tories.
“I don’t care what Keir Starmer says right now, the Labour Party will tax my pension,” said Robert, a retired company director from Godalming. “I will be sticking with the Conservatives but the council is run by the Liberals and they might get in this time.”
Sheila, a charity worker also from Godalming, said: “The Conservative Party have really put my nose out of joint. They forced Boris out and he was a good man and I’ve now stopped giving donations to the Conservative Party.
“I am thinking about Nigel Farage but I suppose I shall choose where to put my cross when I get into the voting booth.”
With postal votes arriving this week and polling day fast-approaching, Mr Hunt has just days left to persuade voters not to desert him.
A source on Mr Hunt’s campaign team said: “It is not new information that the previous Conservative administration did not introduce a long term workforce plan for the NHS, but as the Chancellor has noted many times, it is to this Prime Minister’s great credit that the government he led was the first in modern history to do so.
“As for the other comments, the Chancellor was simply reflecting honestly and openly with his constituents.”
The Conservative Party was contacted for comment.
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