Why even UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt fears losing this election

With postcard villages, country pubs and an air of unrivaled wealth, there are few more important strongholds for Britain's Conservative Party than Surrey, where voters chose Jeremy Hunt, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, as a legislator in five consecutive elections.

But even he admits he could leave Parliament after July 4.

“I'm very well known locally, I knock on doors, I talk to people and I've had quite a following in my 19 years as a congressman,” Mr. Hunt told the New York Times last week as he was preparing to call for votes in Chiddingfold. , 50 miles southwest of London. But it's definitely the hardest it's ever been.

That the second most powerful man in government now sees himself as the underdog is testament to the scale of the threat facing the Conservatives in next month's general election.

Several opinion polls predict a landslide victory for the opposition Labor Party, which would eliminate many long-serving conservative lawmakers from Parliament. Although Mr. Hunt, who grew up in the area and still lives there, could still defy the odds, analysts say he is vulnerable.

I'd be really surprised if Jeremy Hunt survives, frankly, said Robert Ford, a political science professor at the University of Manchester, adding that while Mr. Hunt's local connections, moderate politics and high profile have earned him a strong personal vote, its not much of a life raft when you're facing a tsunami.

In leafy places like Chiddingfold, where the village pub dates from the 14th century, the most potent threat comes not from Labor but from the centrist Liberal Democrats, or Lib Dems, whose polls poll increased recently. The party's more moderate policies are more acceptable to conservative-leaning voters who do not want to switch to Labor.

Godalming and Ash, which Mr Hunt hopes to win, is a new constituency created after local boundaries were redrawn, but it includes much of the area he has represented since 2005. And this part of Surrey has many working commuters in well-paid sectors. fund jobs in London, as well as those who have left the capital to raise a family.

In areas where they are best placed to beat the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats also hope to persuade centrist or left-wing voters who might generally favor Labor or the Greens to switch support, a process known as tactical voting .

In Shere, the village where Mr Hunt first went to school, a Lib Dem sign stands outside the house of Bob Jarrett, who worked for the European Commission before retiring to the village there is over twenty years old. I'm a member of the Labor Party, Mr Jarrett admitted with a smile, but voting Labor here is a wasted vote, so I vote Liberal Democrat.

Critics say conservatives are solely responsible for the mutiny taking place in their backyard. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss sacrificed the party's reputation for economic competence by spooking financial markets with a plan of unfunded tax cuts. His scandal-prone predecessor, Boris Johnson, alienated university-educated moderate Tories in the South with his bombastic pro-Brexit rhetoric, disregard for business and violation of lockdown rules during the Covid pandemic .

Many Conservatives remained loyal to the party in the last election because Labor was then led by Jeremy Corbyn, a far-left lawmaker. But his successor, Keir Starmer, has put the party firmly at the center and is a far less frightening prospect.

These are voters who do not share the worldview of the post-Brexit Conservative Party on Brexit, on immigration, on social values, on the nationalist drumbeat, Professor Ford said.

The beneficiary here could be Liberal Democrat candidate Paul Follows.

“I don't think there's been a paradigm shift from the Conservatives, I think the Conservatives have moved away from people,” Mr Follows said as he sipped coffee in a Godalming cafe. As for Mr Hunt, he added, he was a minister four times. If he's out here thinking he's the underdog, I think things have gotten a little lost in the world.

As Mr Hunt headed to the Chiddingfolds village hall in jeans, a jacket and an open-collared shirt, he blamed global headwinds for the problems facing his party and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

I think it's similar to how President Biden is struggling in the United States after a period where voters were really bruised by the pandemic and inflation, he told the Times. The governments in place have suffered. But, he concedes, we didn't do everything right ourselves.

Inside, the questions asked of Mr Hunt by around 40 villagers were polite but often critical. The ice was broken early when the chancellor's cell phone rang and he disconnected the call, declaring: “It's not Rishi.” It then moved on to issues relating to tax, the economy, healthcare, anti-lockdown parties at Downing Street and Brexit, which Mr Hunt opposed in a 2016 referendum but which he now supports.

To complicate matters, Mr Hunt faces a challenge to his right from Reform UK, the populist successor to the Brexit Party. The Reform candidate in that region, Graham Drage, said Trump ally Nigel Farage's decision to lead the party had increased his support, albeit in a region that voted to remain in the European Union.

A supporter of deregulation and tax cuts, Mr. Drage, an independent consultant, was unfazed when asked whether, by winning Conservative votes, he would help the Liberal Democrats oust Mr. Hunt.

“That doesn't concern me at all,” Drage said. There is no point in re-electing the Conservatives so they can betray everyone for another four or five years.

Jane Austin, who works in Mr Hunts' parliamentary team, said he had always treated the area as a marginal seat, but this time there are probably a thousand, two thousand votes, that's where I honestly think we are there.

If he loses, Mr Hunt could be the most high-profile Tory election casualty since Michael Portillo, a former minister, in 1997, the year Tony Blair brought Labor to power in a landslide victory. But Mr Hunt, 57, is popular in this area and particularly in Shere, the village where he grew up and where his younger brother, Charlie, lived until his death last year from cancer at 53.

Outside Hillys Tea Shop in Shere, healthcare software company owner Craig Burke recalled how he recently ran a marathon with Mr. Hunt to raise money for a cancer charity.

The thing about Jeremy is that he made his money in business before he got into politics, so it was never about the money, Mr. Burke said. He went into it with the right intentions.

The tide against conservatives is so strong that even friends are thinking carefully about how to vote.

If I didn't know Jeremy, I would be in the country's mentality, Mr. Burke said. For change.