Jeremy Hunt’s bland ambition

If it were not for the distinctive beauty of Cleopatra’s nose, Pascal once suggested, the Roman empire might not have fallen. Think of the play of chance – though without the beautiful nose – in the recent history of the Conservative party. Imagine if Jeremy Hunt, rather than Boris Johnson, had become Tory leader in 2019. Prime minister Hunt then completes Brexit with the coalition inherited from Theresa May. The 2019 election, which accelerated the recovery of Labour, would never have happened. There would have been a Jeremy v Jeremy election in 2022 and Britain would now be three years into the second Hunt administration.

Can We Be Great Again? is the manifesto for the conservatism that might have informed this fantasy government. And though there is much to question here, there is no question that Hunt’s leadership would have been better for Britain than the reckless radicalism of Johnson, the ideological arrogance of Truss or the static technocracy of Sunak.

This is a comprehensive book. There are chewy chapters on security, the magic of democracy, mass migration, climate change, the terms of global trade, pandemic prevention, human rights and artificial intelligence. It is full of good facts and I learned a lot.

However, like the vintage and reasonable conservative that he is, Hunt does not have triumphalist or vainglorious ambitions. His prologue, a brief reprise of being appointed chancellor by Liz Truss to clear up her mess, deftly establishes, with a generous account of the excellent civil service, that there will be no deep-state, conspiracy theory nonsense here. This is another way of saying that, though his publishers obviously thought that Hunt needed a declarative title, Can We Be Great Again? is the worst line in the book. It is too obviously an echo of the Trumpian and Faragist politics that Hunt is trying to counter. The less he tries to redeem the promise of his title, the better this work is.

Mercifully, Hunt has written a book that would be more accurately titled “Make Britain Somewhat Better Again”. I was gratified to find the case made for more overseas students, for the strength of the BBC and for the efficacy of some aid spending. I came away optimistic about Britain’s brilliance in science and the “letter to Keir Starmer”, which is the book’s epilogue, made me think that the prime minister could do worse than invite Hunt to run his industrial strategy.

The ecumenical nature of this book is, though, a flaw as well as a virtue. Hunt has an impressive array of recommendations from Tony Blair, William Hague, Lord Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, Prof Paul Collier and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. I was rather reminded of Robert Nozick’s passage in Anarchy, State and Utopia when he asks whether there is any philosophical idea that would satisfy Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor and the Buddha. To keep the whole crew on board, Hunt, time and again, takes an intermediate view between two extremes. Engage with China so we can raise human rights abuses. Invest in developing economies to help improve their fragile states. Free trade is desirable but “it is also worth asking whether Trump has a point”. Balance innovation and safety with artificial intelligence.

There are times when Hunt is just too even-handed. His commitment to free trade screams for the conclusion that Britain should rejoin the single market of the EU and it is clear that he cannot yet say so out loud. The reasonable front really falls over, though, when it comes to the US . When Hunt, as foreign secretary, met Trump at the height of the crisis in Syria he mentioned the White Helmets. “Are they good guys or bad guys?” asked the president.

On Trump, Hunt writes as if he were addressing a good guy when in fact he is trying to reason with a bad guy. If there is one message in this book it is that we should engage in the world and if there were one message from Trump’s foreign policy, it is that he doesn’t want to. When he was foreign secretary, Hunt asked his department how much of European defence, by value, is paid for by the Americans. The answer turns out to be somewhere between a third and a half. It’s a worrying reliance, and on free trade, on Ukraine, on commitment to the Nato alliance, on net zero and on membership of the WHO, Hunt offers laudable ambitions to which Trump is a barrier. There are holes where the Americans need to be and it is not obvious that a re-engaged Britain, however well meaning, is quite the replacement.

This is an ambitious book and so it is, in a sense, unfair that my concluding thought should be parochial. Yet it was impossible not to think – even when I disagreed – that I was glad of the question Jeremy Hunt was asking. Too many on the right of British politics are asking not whether we can be great again but simply whether we can be Britain again. If Huntism, rather than Faragism, turns out to be the face of modern Conservatism, we would all benefit. Whether Britain would be great again is a moot point, but it would certainly be somewhat better.