Yahoo Finance Election 2024: What Jeremy Hunt’s X feed reveals about his hyper-local campaign
Jeremy Hunt lives at one of the loftiest addresses in British politics.
No11, home to the Chancellor and scene of those pre-Budget red box snaps, would – you’d think – be an ideal place to be photographed campaigning for re-election.
Especially for Hunt, who can claim at least some credit for re-stabilising the UK economy post-Liz Truss’ disastrous fiscal event almost two years ago, and who on May 22 pledged it “will be my honour to fight with every bone in my body” for Rishi Sunak’s reelection.
But Hunt, who has today readily admitted his Godalming and Ash seat is “on a knife edge”, has taken a somewhat different approach to his bid to hold onto the constituency.
The Liberal Democrats are scenting blood in the newly redrawn seat, where the new boundaries of some 71,232 voters include the village the Chancellor grew up in and the town he went to school in.
And according to the Electoral Calculus predictions, they have a 59 per cent chance of victory, to the Tories’ 40 per cent and Labour’s one per cent.
Deputy leader Daisy Cooper even launched the party’s ad van, emblazoned with Hunt’s face and the warning ‘Don’t let the Conservatives bet the house again’ in the seat on Wednesday.
Hunt held his former South West Surrey constituency with a majority of just 8,817 in 2019, and the new seat is predicted to have a notional Conservative majority of more than 10,000.
As he fights for his political survival, the former health secretary and veteran MP has eschewed glossy Westminster snaps to focus his efforts on going hyper-local.
His X, formerly Twitter, feed jumps between posts on “mobile phone reception in Cranleigh and the villages” to welcoming inflation hitting the Bank of England’s two per cent target before going right back to “updates on the Bramley fuel leak”.
Since the election was called, he’s held ten evening meetings with undecided voters in village halls and churches from Milford and Shere to Chiddingford and Arbuthnot – with more to come.
The Chancellor has also been photographed at Milford and Godalming fetes, and pictured with cabinet colleague Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, at Cranleigh village hospital.
Since the election was called, he’s also posted 56 ‘grid posts’—permanent feed photos rather than disappearing Stories—to Instagram and appears in chatty videos looking relatively suntanned from those hours on the doorstep.
And dotted between Conservative campaign lines on Keir Starmer’s tax rises (which the Labour leader denies) and posts on the D-Day anniversary are the minutiae of detailed constituency work – from zebra crossings to ASDA planning applications.
Even a mild joke about the misspelling of a local roundabout made it to the Chancellor’s feed.
It’s, of course, a quirk of the British parliamentary system that even figures like the Chancellor must concern themselves with ward-level issues in the hopes of retaining power.
But it sheds some light, this time around, on just how tight some of these big beast races are set to be.
As first revealed by the Guardian, Hunt has even donated over £100,000 to his own local party since 2019, perhaps in the hope of bolstering support.
Speaking to reporters this morning, Hunt said: “This is a very marginal constituency. I’ve always treated it as a marginal constituency. I’m fighting for every vote.
“I think I can win… but I don’t take anything for granted. It is on a knife edge. And that’s why I’m knocking on doors six hours every day, meeting lots of people, making the arguments.”
For his own sake, he’ll have to be hoping they are good ones.
