Jeremy Hunt, 59, is a Conservative MP for Godalming and Ash, and was first elected to the House of Commons in 2005. He went on to be the UK’s longest-serving health secretary from (2012-2018) and chancellor of the exchequer, also overseeing the London Olympics as culture secretary. Born in Kennington, he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, before later becoming an English teacher in Japan and then an entrepreneur, co-founding the Hotcourses education publisher.
When the business was sold in 2017, he made millions and would go on to be one of the UK’s richest politicians. He was a candidate for the leadership election in 2019, finishing second to Boris Johnson. Hunt has just published his third book, Can We Be Rich Again? The Surprising Potential of Britain’s Economy, and lives between Pimlico in London, and Surrey, with his wife Lucia and three children, Jack, Anna and Eleanor (11, 14 and 15).
Here, he looks back at the moments that shaped him, from his very optimistic mother, the pressure of public life on his family, and the grief of losing his brother.
I’ve had several near-death experiences in terms of my political career. Things have very nearly gone badly wrong, and I don’t think you can survive those things unless you have an inner optimism and are prepared to see the positives. If you read books by psychologists and life coaches, very often the way that you find optimism or get yourself out of depression is by getting a sense of perspective. I have a magic moment in my morning when I go for a run – although I don’t go every morning now, because I’m going to be 60, so I should think about my knees. I don’t listen to music or podcasts; I just allow my mind to wander, and I find that’s a really good moment for just stepping back and trying to take a helicopter view of myself, my life and the world. To have that sense of proper perspective.
My mum had a permanently sunny disposition. She was one of those people who always said there’s always a solution to any problem. She was in good spirits in private as well as in public; it wasn’t a front. She was a ball of energy, and she had an infectious enthusiasm and optimism about her life.
My dad had incredible faith in me. He was an admiral in the Navy but he wasn’t someone who looked like a military figure at all. He was tough, but he came across as very kind and thoughtful. He had an absolute rock-solid determination when he set his mind on achieving something. If my mum’s view was that there’s always a solution to every problem, my dad’s view was that there is no ceiling to how high you can climb. When I would come home after I’d set up my business, and say: “Well, you know, hopefully we’ll build a business that’s worth a few million in a few years,” he’d say: “Nonsense, you’re going to be a billionaire.” And if I said: “I’d love to one day be a cabinet minister”, he’d say: “Nonsense, you’re going to be prime minister.” I would try to explain that he didn’t understand how much luck is involved, and how it doesn’t really work like that, and he’d say: “Nonsense!” I didn’t make it to be prime minister and actually, very sadly, he died before I became Chancellor. He’d have loved that.
Losing my brother has been a profound loss. He was my best friend [Charlie Hunt died from spindle cell sarcoma, a rare cancer, in August 2023] and he was the person that I was looking forward to having a pint in the pub with when we both retired. After a while, grief turns into gratitude, because you feel just blessed to have had someone wonderful in your life, but there’s always a sting, and I imagine that’ll never go away. This morning on my run, I was thinking, how lucky I am that I’ve got a lovely family, I can enjoy writing my books; I’m settled and happy as a backbencher in parliament for this next chapter in my life – and then I immediately thought, but it’s so unfair that my brother’s not got that same life to look forward to.
There’s a tension between family life and politics. The terrible truth about politics, when it comes to families, is this: when I was health secretary, I was thinking this is the most important job I’ll ever do in my life and I could be sacked tomorrow. And so what you do is you put everything into it, and you’re a man in a hurry, and you say to your family implicitly: “Don’t worry, just bear with me for this short period in my life, I’ll be with you as soon as it’s over, but this is something really big I’ve got to focus on.” Then, you know, 11 years later, I was still in the cabinet. That’s why politics can be dangerous for families. I always had a rule that I would never work on Sundays, because I wanted to have a day that I was focused on the family, but what I found in reality is that you’ve got The Andrew Marr Show and Sunday with Laura Knuessberg. If you’re foreign secretary or health secretary, there are going to be stories you need to be across and TV interviews, and then your mind is racing and you’re thinking about something big happening in the days ahead. You’re there, but you’re not present. My children have never known me to be anything other than an MP, so I am very conscious of the price families pay for politics. You hope it will bring you together, and in my case, this is what happened, but we all felt the pressure at different moments, too.
As a country, we’ve lost our mojo. The climate of wokery has been very damaging in both Britain and America. I remember when he was alive, I was privileged to meet Dr Henry Kissinger many times, and he said to me that his biggest worry was that Britain and America were being consumed by self-doubt, which was sometimes turning into self-loathing. The truth is that neither country is perfect but the international order that we put together at the end of the Second World War – Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – has been the most successful in the history of humanity. We’ve had more prosperity, more freedom, more democracy than any other period in human history, and it’s now under very severe threat, and people are looking to Britain in America. Other countries are worried that we’re not there to defend this precious gift that we gave the world. So I do think that one of our greatest strengths is our openness, but sometimes we turn that into one of our greatest weaknesses, because we’ve become self-critical. We only want to talk about Britain setting up the slave trade; we never want to talk about Britain abolishing the slave trade, and that’s where I think perspective is really important.
“Can We Be Rich Again?” by Jeremy Hunt (£25, Swift Press) is out on 4 June 2026
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