Potential Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt has hailed David Cameron and George Osborne’s “genius” for persuading the public to accept austerity without triggering violent protests.
The foreign secretary said the former prime minister and ex-chancellor “put the economy back on its feet” despite “the most challenging cuts to public spending in peacetime history”.
In an interview with the New Statesman, Hunt also praised his former cabinet colleagues for doing it without provoking the kind of mass riots seen when Margaret Thatcher tried to introduce the poll tax in 1990.
Riots did break out across England in 2011 following the shooting of Tottenham man Mark Duggan by police, but these were not necessarily specifically linked to austerity.
However there have been several non-violent anti-austerity protests attended by hundreds of thousands of people since the Tories took power in 2010.
Cameron and Osborne headed up the coalition government of 2010 which took power following the financial crash, and later the Tory majority administration from 2015-16.
During their time in office they oversaw widespread cuts to public spending in areas like welfare, local government, police and public sector pay.
Cameron quit following humiliating defeat in the 2016 Brexit referendum while Osborne was purged from the cabinet by the next prime minister, Theresa May, along with other senior allies.
Hunt, who is widely expected to launch a bid to succeed May, suggested austerity was necessary but bemoaned the fact that the Tories were not able to persuade the public that they were moderate centrists during a time of such widespread cuts.
“The genius of David Cameron and George Osborne was that they persuaded the country to accept the most challenging cuts to public spending in our peacetime history without poll tax[-style] riots, and that put the economy back on its feet to the extent we’re now creating 1,000 jobs every single day since we’ve been in office,” he said.
“But the other side of the coin, unfortunately, was that we were never able to get across the message that we are one nation Conservatives with a vision for everyone: it just wasn’t possible in that climate of austerity to win that argument.”
Hunt, who was health secretary during the coalition years, also said the cuts affected him more than others.
“When we were in recession we had to make very, very painful public spending cuts, six years of austerity in the NHS, which I felt more than any other cabinet minister, when we didn’t have as much money as we needed,” he said.