‘I’m not expecting a call from Nigel’: Jeremy Hunt on

Exclusive: as Reform courts Tory vote, chancellor insists election campaigns are won from the centre ground

At the first three doors that Jeremy Hunt knocked on during his canvassing session in leafy Godalming earlier this week were voters who said they would back the Conservatives.

The chancellor, looking a bit embarrassed, admitted that they were not representative of what his team have been seeing across this Surrey constituency, where his 8,800 majority is under threat from the resurgent Liberal Democrats.

But at the fourth door, Tory voters Stephen and Caroline told him they felt it was time for change. “The Conservatives have had a good crack at the whip,” said Stephen. “Unfortunately I think they’ve lost their way.”

Many in Westminster were surprised when Hunt announced that he would be running again, with former colleagues like Theresa May and Michael Gove having decided it was time to stand down after 14 years running the country.

After almost 20 years in parliament and a string of senior cabinet jobs, including foreign secretary and chancellor, and with the Tories on course to lose the next election and with it swathes of constituencies – including his own of Godalming and Ash – some expected Hunt to retire from parliament.

Yet he had no such plans. “I think I can hold it,” he said in an interview with the Guardian in the Inn on the Lake pub in the town. “But it’s going to be a very big fight, the biggest I’ve ever had.”

Like many fellow Conservative candidates, Hunt is getting squeezed from both the left – with the Lib Dems on course to take the seat – and the right, from what he describes as “Boris Conservatives” who will presumably now drift to Reform.