Once you have defeated the temptation to let your finger slip to the bottom row on the keyboard, what do you call Jeremy Hunt? A liar? It feels to me possible to make the case, so let me begin.

Hunt was all for Remain in the 2016 referendum. The NHS would face budget cuts, and an exodus of overseas doctors and nurses if the UK left, he declared. Now the former health secretary appears willing to risk the lives of the sick by declaring that, although there would be disruption, “I’ve always thought that even in a no-deal situation this is a great country and we’ll find a way to flourish and prosper”.

Or to put it another way, what this miserable man describes in his mangled middle-manager English as a “no-deal situation” could end up killing British citizens. He hasn’t “always thought” we will flourish. Indeed, he thought the exact opposite. The British Medical Association has itemised the million patients who will be excluded from the European Rare Disease Network in the event of a crash out, the delays in cancer treatment and the weakening of the UK’s defences against pandemics.

No one gets anywhere on the right by talking the language of compromise, as Hunt quickly grasped

Labour’s health spokesman, Jon Ashworth, talks of how Hunt could not have failed to have learned during his five years as health secretary that we import 37m packs of medicine a month, including 99% of insulin supplies, from the EU and rely for their safe delivery on frictionless borders. It is “highly irresponsible”, he says, for a former health secretary to be so casual with the lives of others.

Is Hunt irresponsible because he appears to be a coward and an ambitious coward at that. To become prime minister, he must win the support of Conservative party members who believe in alarming numbers that Britain must endure a hard Brexit, whatever the consequences.

This grim fact alone could explain why Hunt cannot be consistent. He was warning of the dangers of Brexit to the economy and public health in the spring of 2016. Far from accepting the referendum result as if it were the word of God, he said immediately afterwards there should be a second referendum on the terms of the deal and urged the virtues of a “sensible compromise”. No one gets anywhere on the right by talking the language of compromise, as Hunt quickly grasped. With a U-turn as impressive in its speed as its shamelessness, he decided the EU was the USSR, a grotesque piece of crowd-pleasing that mocked the tens of millions who suffered and diedunder communism, and then pandered to the most dangerous fantasies in modern Britain.

You can parade your insider status by nodding knowingly and saying that this was the smart move. You can imply, although no one ever quite says this, that Tory Remainers in the cabinet are losers because they stick by their old convictions. Or you can pull yourself up and reflect that tout comprendre should not always mean tout pardonner. It is easy to comprehend men such as Hunt. But the better you comprehend them the harder it should be to pardon them.

Even two years ago, I – and, more to the point, my editors – would have worried about using words such as coward, slimy opportunist, and dangerous fool to describe Hunt. Successful societies survive by showing restraint and observing the formalities. “Coward” is literally triggering: words that cannot be forgiven, words that provoked men to reach for their duelling pistols in the old aristocratic honour cultures and their knives in gang culture today. Moderate polities avoid them in the interests of preventing arguments going beyond the point of no return.

In better times, his petty evasions would not be worth bothering with

In the US, there was an almost comical debate on whether serious journalists should call Donald Trump’s lies “lies”. The New York Times tried “falsehood” and “demonstrable falsehoods” as polite alternatives. Forced though the circumlocutions may seem, they were a throwback to an age when reporters thought it improper to use incendiary language. They could quote rival politicians saying Trump was a liar. But to say so themselves in a news report felt unprofessional, even when Trump lied as a matter of policy and a matter of course.

Hunt lacks the self-belief to be a true Trumpian megalomaniac. The best we see is that he boasts, like a school sneak who has ingratiated himself with the playground bully, how Trump in his graciousness had condescended to notice that Hunt had praised him on Fox News during a presidential visit to Britain. “The next morning at Chequers, I met the president,” he gushed. “He came down and said, ‘Great interview!’ And then he… turned to the person next to me and said, ‘I don’t know who this guy is, but great.’”

Rather than being a Trump or Putin, Hunt is a characteristic bit player from the age of Trump and Putin; a politician who recommends a course reckoned by experts to be disastrous because chaos is in fashion and promoting it is the best way for the sharp operator to get on. In better times, none one would “know who this guy is” and his evasions would not be worth bothering with. In our crisis, his pettiness balloons into a clear threat to our health and wellbeing.

The New York Times decided, incidentally, that it could forget the formalities and call Trump’s lies “lies”, after all. It now publishes a list that seems to go on for ever documenting them. We, too, should not be held back by the taboos of a world that has gone. If I’ve made my case, the answer to my initial question is that Jeremy Hunt is a liar and unless he is stopped this may make him our next prime minister.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist