Every family across the UK knows the familiar dread of hosting a party, attended by an infamous uncle who can always be relied on to say something outrageous and offend unfamiliar guests.
When it comes to Theresa May’s cabinet, there could be a few contenders for the title of ‘embarrassing uncle,’ but this week, it appears to be the Prime Minister’s Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. Mr S couldn’t help but note that while the Conservatives have posted transcripts of every minister of state’s conference speech on their press website (with the notable exception of the dull Greg Clark), Jeremy Hunt’s speech is conspicuously absent.
Why the cold shoulder for Hunt? Mr S thinks it’s down to his crowd-pleasing remark at conference, which compared the European Union to the USSR:
‘What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream?’ The ‘EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.’
Unfortunately, while it was well received by party activists, the less-than-diplomatic language has not gone down well with former Soviet states that have since joined the EU. The Estonian ambassador to the UK complained: ‘EU and USSR not comparable. Soviet regime was brutal, I lived under it, comparison is insulting’
Hunt has since tried to make the weak case that he was in fact saying that the European Union was set up ‘to counter the Soviet Union’.
Fortunately for him, it’s not easy to set the record straight when his transcript has been removed from public view.
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