What a year it’s been for Jeremy Hunt. Just four months ago, he was running to be Tory leader on a platform of lower taxes. Back then he was urging his party to cancel Rishi Sunak’s planned rise in corporation tax and instead reduce the rate from 19 per cent to 15 per cent. Now of course it is Sunak in No. 10, with Hunt next door hiking the tax up to 25 per cent next April.
Such tax rises have, unsurprisingly, alienated much of the Tory right, including Hunt’s erstwhile ally Esther McVey. As Christopher Montgomery of the Critic notes, back in July Hunt wanted to make the Brexiteer his deputy PM as the pair would ‘be a formidable campaigning team.’ He told the BBC’s Sunday morning programme:
I recognise that the leader of a political party has to win elections, and that means a broad appeal. So just as Tony Blair had John Prescott to broaden his appeal as his deputy prime minister, I will have Esther McVey as my deputy prime minister. She’s won a lot of elections against Labour in the North, I’ve won them against Lib Dems in the South.
Sadly it seems that the dynamic duo have had a difference of opinion. For while Hunt took the view that it was necessary to hike taxes in last week’s Autumn Statement – arguing that ‘there is nothing Conservative about spending money that you haven’t got’ – McVey claims today that his address ‘was Gordon Brown-esque in its devotion to a socialist paradise of tax and spend.’
According to McVey, ‘wails of disappointment rang out across the country’ at Hunt’s speech. It was ‘a bad day for the Conservative Party and for those who believe in Conservative values’ and amounted to ‘punishing Conservative voters – who, come the next election, are now set to punish us.’
Not so much a dream ticket as a nightmare row.
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