While Jeremy Hunt runs for PM, who is our foreign secretary? So much for ‘global Britain’

At a time of high international tension and with no Brexit deal in sight, we have a foreign secretary whose mind clearly isn’t on the job

Jeremy Hunt makes a campaign visit to Royal Portbury Dock in Bristol. Was it necessary? (Getty)

The UK is preparing to rebrand itself “global Britain”. It wants to show that it is open for business and open to the world. Once the constraints of EU membership are removed, the opportunities to spread our wings and rule the waves again will be boundless – or so we are being told. To that end, the foreign secretary – the UK’s chief diplomat – is glad-handing a stream of foreign visitors here and meeting counterparts abroad in an effort to put the country back on the international map.

Except that he isn’t, is he? For the past few weeks and at least the next three, that is not what he is doing at all. He is spending most of his time running – we seem to have adopted the US terminology for this contest – for the Conservative Party leadership, and if he wins, he will also be the next prime minister.

This is why the people he is currently glad-handing are the party members who have a vote in this particular election, and those likely to influence them, and why the world he is travelling stops, for the time being, at our national borders. What is more, he may never return to the Foreign Office full-time. If he wins, he will move into Downing Street; if he loses, the likelihood is that he will either be out of government or assigned another portfolio.