How ‘Theresa May in Trousers’ and his gang of embittered Remainers plotted for over a YEAR

JEREMY Hunt had been preparing for last night’s vote for more than a year – convinced that he can avenge his defeat by Boris Johnson in the 2019 leadership contest.

Mr Hunt claimed yesterday that the confidence motion ‘was not a debate I wanted to have now’, before plunging the knife into the Prime Minister by saying that the party was ‘not offering the integrity, competence and vision necessary to unleash the enormous potential of our country’.

Given the scale and duration of Mr Hunt’s shadow leadership operation, his remarks struck many Tory MPs as duplicitous in the extreme.

Mr Hunt has refused to relinquish his ambitions since losing to Mr Johnson by nearly two votes to one in 2019, assiduously courting Boris-sceptics in the party and placing two of his former government special advisers on his payroll as far back as March 2021.

Rebels such as former Cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell and Ludlow MP Philip Dunne – who was last month pictured deep in conversation with anti-Boris Tory MPs at a Chelsea pub –

have been talking up Mr Hunt as ‘a serious player for serious times’, a description mocked by the Prime Minister’s allies. ‘Theresa May in trousers – without the charisma’ was the verdict of one, while another warned that Hunt’s ‘impenetrable blandness’ would lead to electoral disaster.

The May jibe highlighted the yawning political gulf between the buccaneering Brexiteerism of the Johnsonites, and the technocratic pro-Remain approach of Mr Hunt and his managerial tribe.

MR Hunt’s team stepped up their operations earlier this year when Rishi Sunak’s leadership hopes appeared to have crashed in the wake of revelations about his wife’s tax status. Mr Hunt’s team love-bombed the Chancellor’s supporters in the One Nation group of Tory MPs.

In the immediate aftermath of the last leadership contest, Mr Hunt admitted that his Remain vote was ‘a hurdle we couldn’t overcome’. But he has convinced himself that his views on Brexit are no longer as politically toxic as they were.

His team have focused their canvassing in particular on the 107 new Tory MPs elected in 2019 – many of whom won their seats on a wave of pro-Brexit sentiment in the Red Wall seats in the Midlands and North – offering them ‘a chat with Jeremy’ to discuss the ‘new priorities’ in the party.

One eurosceptic Tory MP told The Mail on Sunday that Mr Hunt was ‘going round seeing everyone to test the waters. He says he is pro-Brexit now, that he is not going to reverse it. He’s a nice bloke, but I don’t know what the question is if “Jeremy Hunt” is the answer.’ Former Tory peer Lord (Andrew) Cooper commented that Mr Hunt’s apparent conversion to Brexit made him an ‘unprincipled windsock’.

Senior Boris allies have poured scorn on the notion that the party’s centrist bloc could produce a Hunt premiership. They warn that if Mr Hunt were to run for the top job again, MPs on the right of the party would simply unite around an ABH – Anyone But Hunt – candidate such as Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

One Boris loyalist said: ‘That One Nation wing of the party never produces a Prime Minister, they don’t have the numbers. We would just find a candidate who can beat him’. Another highlighted the failures of Hunt’s 2019 campaign, saying that ‘the more people saw of him’ – meaning first MPs, then the party members who decide the victor – ‘the less they wanted him’.

Mr Hunt, who is head of the Commons health select committee, is expected to offer inducements to the Remain-dominated roster of other committee chairmen to bolster his bid if a leadership contest goes ahead. These are likely to include Tobias Ellwood, the chairman of the Commons defence committee who last week provoked incredulity by calling for the UK to rejoin the single market.

Tom Tugendhat, the pro-Remain chairman of the foreign affairs committee, is, according to colleagues, ‘running to place’ – in other words, using the contest in order to win a Cabinet job under Hunt – while Huw Merriman, the anti-Brexit chairman of the transport committee, is also hopeful of a prominent position.

Other potential members of a Hunt Cabinet include Mrs May’s former first secretary of state, Damian Green, and, as a token Brexiteer, Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, who was decidedly cagey about her own leadership ambitions throughout yesterday’s drama. Some even predict that Mrs May herself could return in a senior role such as Chancellor.

LURKING in the background of Team Hunt is the spectral figure of George Osborne, suspected by Boris allies of being the secret Godfather of the Hunt campaign. The former chancellor flatly denies this, claiming to be too busy with his new investment banking job to be interested in a change of Prime Minister.

But Queen of the Huntites is undoubtedly Mrs May, who has been quietly seething about Mr Johnson since he succeeded her as Prime Minister in 2019 after helping to foment the Commons rebellions over her withdrawal deal with the EU. While she has made increasingly outspoken criticisms over issues such as Brexit, Covid restrictions and Partygate, her loyalist MPs have toured the Commons to lobby for a change of leadership.

After months of scheming, ‘Theresa in Trousers’ is hoping to exact revenge on her behalf.