Public Enemy Number One

This week: why Jeremy Hunt should be the new Liam Byrne. Also: whatever happened to the Near East? And the lightning map of the world.

In May 2015, Liam Byrne wrote an op-ed for the Observer. “I am so sorry,” it began. His infamous “I’m afraid there is no money” note, left for his successor as chief secretary of the Treasury five years before, had been a surprisingly big part of the previous week’s election: Byrne had put a face on the narrative of Labour profligacy the Tories wanted to push; “I made it easy for our opponents to bash our economic record by bashing me.” If he’d hoped his mea culpa would calm things down, though, he’d be disappointed: senior Tories were still referencing the note as the 2024 election neared. This was of course hugely embarrassing to all concerned – but they kept doing it because it had worked.

I’m not sure whether today’s Labour party is less cynical or merely less competent in its comms strategy; both, probably. But while Liz Truss is occasionally invoked as a cautionary tale, few of her erstwhile colleagues would still defend her, and there’s been no attempt to create a Tory bogeyman to shape the narrative Labour needs. Hell, there’s been no obvious attempt to create a narrative.

But the government does still need one. So here’s my suggestion of a Tory whose name should be dragged through the mud at every opportunity – a man whose failure has gone largely uncommented, even though it highlights the entire problem with Tory priorities. Public enemy number one should be Jeremy Hunt.

I know this is lame, but making it was cathartic, even if it can’t cope with the “£” sign. Image: official government portrait/MobileFish.com.

This might seem an odd choice. Hunt is not from the crazy wing of the party: he was the “stop Boris” candidate in 2019, for all the good it did us, and was brought in as Chancellor to replace Kamikaze Kwasi in 2022 in a “for god’s sake somebody grab the wheel” kind of way. He’d followed an appalling stint at Media & Culture with an only moderately rubbish one at Health, sure. But I always felt like his elevation to elder statesman status was the result less of competence than of longevity, plus a dash of not following his party to the populist right. Say what you like about Jeremy Hunt – and no one will ever say it better than Luke Turner did for the Quietus back in 2012 – but no one would argue that he was anything other than a relatively decent, relatively One Nation sort of chap.

However: there are quite a lot of Tories who seem to have built reputations for being sensible or moderate not on their actual policy positions, but on being better than those who followed. David Cameron is now sometimes seen as the last Prime Minister before the house caught fire, rather than the one who played with the matches; through stints as a podcaster and newspaper editor, George Osborne too seems to have made everyone forget he spent six years splashing petrol about the place. Most baffling of all have been the attempts to reframe Theresa May as a woman of principle – when the only principles she’d ever seemed to hold were a belief that both political opposition and foreign people were somehow illegitimate.

Those things – as with the way many people missed how right-wing Rishi Sunak was, just because he was also cosmopolitan and brown – at least received some comment. Hunt, so far as I can tell, has been let off the hook entirely. On a recent New Statesman podcast he was playing the part of the wise old éminence grise, discussing the importance of a properly funded NHS, politely criticising his Labour successors but being far more damning about Reform, generally making himself out to be the acceptable face of the right. When my former colleague Anoosh Chakelian put it to him that his own fiscal management was a direct cause of the current crisis, he airily said he’d rather not talk about the past.

I’m sure he would – but Anoosh was right. Hunt is personally responsible for a significant chunk of the mess we are now in. In autumn 2023, he cut 2p off the National Insurance rate, in the hope of shoring up his party’s flagging poll ratings. That didn’t work, so the following spring he tried the same thing again. This may have helped him personally – he held his Surrey seat against a LibDem challenge by under 900 votes – and if the goal was to salt the earth for his successor then, well, job done: those tax cuts reduced Rachel Reeves’ headroom by £20bn a year.

This is exactly why Labour should do to him what his lot did to Liam Byrne: there is a direct link between Jeremy Hunt’s politically-motivated choices and the way things are falling apart now. If, as seems likely, taxes are going to go up, the government should first demonise the man who made it necessary; make him the poster boy for Tory failure, to make it possible to argue “We are only fixing what he broke”.

Byrne was in some ways the ideal candidate to be demonised. He was almost unknown, and thus a blank slate, and he is also, that apology notwithstanding, an unsympathetic figure. Hunt, arguably, is a less likely villain. He’s pleasant, decent, moderate. But that’s why his failure matters: the voters should be reminded that even the nice Tories created this mess.

People are going to be angry. People will want someone to blame. In all probability, that’s going to be the government. But that probability becomes certainty, if ministers don’t offer up an alternative.

After all, whatever his many personal failings¹, Liam Byrne’s only crime against the vast majority of us was to write a stupid note. Jeremy Hunt really did ruin the country.

The Book Tour is Back

On the morning Sunday 27 July I’ll be talking borders at the Rock Oyster Festival, Cornwall, with my one-time comrade Tom Phillips. Then later on, we’ll be swapping roles so I can ask Tom questions about the end of the world. I understand Miranda Sawyer will be about, too. If you’re around, come say hi!

And then, on Tuesday 2 September, Lewis Baston and I will be chatting about an incredible 76 different borders at Romford Waterstones. Absolute bargain.

Whatever happened to the Near East?

There’s an awkward paragraph in the introduction to my last book justifying my use of the phrase “Middle East”. It’s clearly a problematic term, being Eurocentric in both the geographical sense (east of where, exactly?) and in the cultural assumptions it contains. Originally, it was one of the “three Easts” – near, middle, and far – whose distance from Europe seemed to double as a comment on their essential alienness. After discussions with academic friends and some light soul searching, though, I decided the best way forward was to admit all this, then note that all the alternatives (MENA, West Asia, SWANA) were likely incomprehensible to a general readership, so I’d be calling it the Middle East anyway. Sorry.

There’s another problem with the term, though, which doesn’t apply to the present day but would affect any geopolitical Rip Van Winkle who’d been in a coma for the last century, awoken with a start and immediately decided to read my book. It’s that the meaning has changed, in a faintly baffling way. The problem can be summed up with a question: what’s it in the middle of, exactly? Or to put that another way: where’s the Near East?

Today, after all, the two phrases seemingly refer to the exact same region. According to the National Geographic Society (according, in turn to Wikipedia), the terms Near East and Middle East are “generally accepted as comprising the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Syria, and Turkey”. Britannica agrees that “for all intents and purposes, Middle East and Near East refer to the same region when used today”.

This, though, was not always true.