With its picture-postcard villages, country pubs and unmistakable affluence, few areas in Britain are as strongholds for the Conservative Party as Surrey, where voters have elected current Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt to office for five consecutive elections.
But he himself acknowledged that he may leave Congress after the Fourth of July.
“I’m very well known locally, I go door-to-door and I talk to people, and I’ve got a certain following in my 19 years as an MP,” Hunt told The New York Times last week as he prepared to call for votes in Chiddingfold, 50 miles southwest of London, “but this is certainly the toughest situation we’ve ever had.”
That the second-most powerful man in the government now sees himself as vulnerable illustrates the scale of the threat the Conservatives face in next month’s general election. Angered by the stagnant economy, the impact of Brexit and the crisis in public services caused by years of government austerity, traditional Conservative voters are abandoning the party in the affluent parts of England that have long provided the Conservatives with their most reliable base of support.
Some polls are predicting a landslide victory for the opposition Labour Party and the ousting of many long-serving Conservative MPs from Parliament. Mr Hunt, who grew up in the area and still lives there, may still thrive, but analysts see him as vulnerable.
“Frankly, I would be really surprised if Jeremy Hunt survives,” said Robert Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, adding that even if Hunt’s local ties, moderate politics and high name recognition could win him a strong personal vote, “it’s not much of a life raft in the face of a tsunami.”
In leafy areas like Chiddingfold, where the village tavern dates back to the 14th century, the biggest threat is not Labour but the centrist Lib Dem party, which has recently seen a rise in popularity, and whose moderate style of politics is more palatable to conservative-leaning voters who don’t want to switch to Labour.
Godalming and Ash, where Hunt hopes to win, is a new constituency created after local boundaries were reshuffled but includes much of the area that Hunt has represented since 2005. The Surrey area is also home to many commuters to London for well-paid finance jobs, as well as people who have moved from the capital to raise children.
In areas where they are best placed to defeat the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats also hope to persuade centre- and left-wing voters who normally back Labour or the Greens to switch support – a tactic known as strategic voting.
In Shire, the village where Hunt first went to school, a Liberal Democrat sign stands outside the home of Bob Jarrett, who worked for the European Commission and retired to the village more than 20 years ago. “I’m a Labour member,” he admits with a grin, “but voting Labour here is a waste of a vote, so I’m voting Liberal Democrat.”
Critics say the Conservatives must take responsibility for their own rebellion at home. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss rattled financial markets with unfunded tax cut plans, costing the party its reputation for economic competence. His scandal-prone predecessor, Boris Johnson, alienated moderate, university-educated Conservatives in the south with his bombastic pro-Brexit rhetoric, contempt for business and flouting lockdown rules during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the last election, Labour was led by far-left MP Jeremy Corbyn, which led many Conservative members to continue to support the party, but Mr Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, has moved the party firmly to the centre, making it a less frightening prospect.
“These are voters who do not share the Conservatives’ post-Brexit worldview on Brexit, immigration, social values and nationalistic demagoguery,” Prof Ford said.
The beneficiary here could be Liberal Democrat candidate Paul Follows.
“I don’t think there’s been a paradigm shift away from the Conservative party, I think they’ve become distant from the people,” Follows said, sipping coffee in a Godalming cafe. Of Hunt, she added: “He’s been a minister four times. If he thinks he’s the underdog here then I think the world is a bit misguided.”
As he walked into Chiddingfold village hall in jeans, a jacket and an open-necked shirt, Hunt blamed global headwinds for the problems facing his party and Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
“I think this is similar to how President Biden is struggling in the United States after a period when the pandemic and inflation really hurt voters,” he told the Times. “This administration has struggled,” but he acknowledged that “we haven’t done everything right either.”
Inside, Hunt was questioned politely but largely critically by around 40 villagers. Tensions quickly eased when the prime minister’s mobile rang and he declared “it’s not Rishi” before hanging up. Questions then moved on to tax, the economy, health, Downing Street’s lockdown-defying party and Brexit, which Hunt opposed in the 2016 referendum but now supports.
Complicating matters, Hunt is facing a challenge from the right from Reform UK, the populist successor to the Brexit Party. Graham Delage, the Reform candidate in the region, said the election of Nigel Farage, a Trump ally, as leader had given him a boost in a region that voted to remain in the EU.
Mr Delage, a self-employed consultant and advocate of deregulation and tax cuts, was unfazed when asked whether winning Conservative votes would help the Liberal Democrats oust Mr Hunt.
“I’m not worried about that at all,” Delage said. “There’s no point in re-electing the Conservatives and having them fail everybody for the next four or five years.”
Jane Austen, who works for Mr Hunt’s parliamentary team, said he had always treated the area as a close constituency but this time “it’s probably got 1,000 or 2,000 votes and I really think it is.”
If Hunt loses, he could become the Conservative Party’s highest-profile candidate in an election since Michael Portillo, the former cabinet minister who swept Labour to power under Tony Blair in 1997. But the 57-year-old is popular in the area, particularly in the village of Shere, where he was born and raised and where his brother Charlie lived until he died of cancer last year, aged 53.
Speaking outside Hilly’s Tea Shop in Shere, Craig Burke, who runs a health software company, reminisced about recently running a marathon with Mr Hunt to raise money for cancer charities.
“The thing about Jeremy is he made his money in business before he went into politics, so it wasn’t about the money,” Burke said. “He went into politics with the right intentions.”
But the tide of opposition to the Conservative Party is so strong that even friends are thinking carefully about how they will vote.
“If I didn’t know Jeremy, I wouldn’t be trying to change the way this country thinks,” Burke said.
