Diplomatic Hunt should play the man, not the ball

The British Foreign Secretary is far too diplomatic and conservative to go for the throat and kill off Boris Johnson for good.

Jeremy Hunt addresses Conservative Party members in Birmingham, England. Picture: AP

What a contrast. “Let sunshine win the day!” declared the new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party at the end of his first conference. That was David Cameron. And then, on the evening when Tory MPs selected the two candidates for the same job, a bloated Tory MP in black tie assaults a woman protesting on behalf of Greenpeace.

Theresa May was right to suspend Mark Field as a Foreign Office minister late on Friday (AEST). But where was his boss? Jeremy Hunt is the Foreign Secretary. Field may be valuable to him as a prominent Leaver and a supporter of Hunt’s campaign to be prime minister, but as Field’s boss, he should have been first out of the traps to condemn this appalling behaviour.

For Hunt no longer needs to ingratiate himself with fellow Tory MPs, some of whom have disgracefully leapt to defend Field. He’s reached the last two. He needs to establish himself as a decisive and commanding figure with his new electorate, the “activist” base of the Conservative Party.

And this would be my reservation about Hunt. He commands diplomats and he has the skills of a diplomat. But has he the smack of authority? He knows how to smooth feathers but is he prepared to ruffle them? Sometimes in politics you need to tell colleagues what they don’t want to hear.

The frustrating thing about this man is that he is palpably intelligent, worldly in the best sense and experienced. One can easily imagine him stepping through the doors of Downing Street, picking up his briefing notes, having serious thoughts about them, and sliding seamlessly on to an international summit. Capable in almost every sense but this. What does he believe, really? He’s a democrat, say those who work with him, with some respect. But is that enough?

We now have three weeks during which this grisly contest moves to the world’s least active activists. And the two rivals should both know, and do — and why pretend? — that Boris Johnson will win unless he manages to sabotage his own campaign.

He has, after all (or so it appears), himself picked his challenger. Johnson’s supporters made no secret of which contender worried the Johnson campaign most, and it was not Hunt. Rory Stewart, as a fresh and disruptive crowd-pleaser, looked like a dangerous outsider, so Johnson avoided the first television debate. Michael Gove has no qualms about taking on Johnson personally, so (some suspicious figures suggest) the Johnson team engineered a little spurt of support for Hunt to knock Gove out of the running. “Do your worst but keep my name out of it” is how one supposes the boss directed his team.

And yet. Why do I get so strong a feeling that, far from being a man on the march and carrying all before him, Johnson is a broken politician? It’s hard to put this in any way that sounds rational but I have a feeling that, even as he wins, he has already lost the mojo that his teamsters praise in Bojo.

Something has died. And the cause? I think it was Gove.

Impostors almost always know they are impostors, and Johnson is nothing if not self-aware. I diagnose here a man who, when the sound of cheering, ringing in his ears, begins to fade, knows what thin ice he’s on and how shallow is the politics beneath the dazzling polish of the surface.

During Johnson’s last bid for the Tory leadership, Gove’s attack on his character and competence, on his organisational ability to be a prime minister at all, did more than damage. It wounded, almost mortally, because it was true.

Gove was a true and original believer in Brexit. Johnson never really did believe — it was a newspaper columnist’s cornucopia, not a reasoned and informed judgment. He still doesn’t really believe because as a columnist he knows that words that hit your readers’ sweet spot are manna to a writer with space to fill, but do not make the argument true. Sitting at your keyboard, there are moments of truth when that’s almost all you do know. “Weak opinions, strongly held” is how one cynic once described the columnist’s art. Johnson knows that well. Gove, a fellow columnist, knew it too: knew it of Johnson, and saw it in him.

“They clap, therefore I am” was his life-saving truth. But after the referendum and after Gove, and after he needed, if he was to succeed, to make people angry rather than make them laugh, something broke. He ceased to be the people-pleaser, and his party are in for a shock when they find out what polling doesn’t yet show, but will. A man who lived by instinct is trying to remake himself as a calculator, a tightrope walker. That’s not him, never was, and never can be. The new Boris will wobble and crash. His minders half know it. Look how tight a hold they keep on him and how fearful they are of exposing him to scrutiny.

On Friday we learnt that another by-election may take the Tory minus-majority further into negative territory.

Stewart’s surprising success in the early rounds of voting suggests that enough Tory MPs are ready to sacrifice ambition to stop no-deal happening. Must we now waste precious months and a general election to prove that Johnson is not the answer?

This is the person Hunt needs to describe to the Conservative membership in the contest. But he won’t. Hunt’s a diplomat, and after he loses he wants to stay as Foreign Secretary. It may not be to his discredit, but it is to his disadvantage, that he’s not the type to play the man instead of the ball. The problem, however, is the man.

The Times