Jeremy Hunt is almost invariably described as “thoroughly nice” or a “decent chap” by fellow MPs and people in government who have worked closely with him.

One of his former employees at his publishing business recalls him as an “affable lummox”, but this genial disposition has given some Conservative colleagues the jitters about supporting him in the leadership race, wondering if he lacks the ruthlessness to do well in No 10.

Softly spoken and rarely riled, Hunt does not have a reputation as a machiavellian operator like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. To some of his rivals, the foreign secretary is a worrying repetition of what has gone before, a managerial politician in an age tending towards populism.

People see him as too nice. OK at running a department but not the leader we need in these times Tory MP

They are also unsure what he believes in, citing a deleted tweet by the former Tory peer Andrew Cooper that Hunt’s conversion from remainer to hard Brexiter made him an “unprincipled windsock”. Theresa-in-trousers (Tit) is the nickname given to him by an opposing camp that has proved somewhat sticky.

“People see him as too nice. OK at running a department but not the leader we need in these times,” says one Conservative MP who decided to back another candidate after being courted by Hunt. He is essentially a “nice, conscientious and quite polite person … there aren’t two faces of Jeremy Hunt,” says one of his former staffers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hunt is devoted to his wife, Lucia – but mistakenly referred to her as Japanese. Photograph: Niklas Halle’n/AFP/Getty Images

People who have worked in his private office are full of stories about him bringing in the coffees each morning and showing interest in their families. He is also devoted to his wife, Lucia, who let slip in a joint interview at the weekend that her nickname for him is “Big Rice”, while he calls her “precious”.

Aware that his goodnatured reputation could be seen as a weakness, his campaign has presented him as a tough negotiator who has the business experience to see the country through Brexit and the compassion to unite it afterwards. Supportive MPs and his former business partner appear in his launch video to stress that politeness doesn’t mean he lacks steel.

Examples Hunt cites include his oversight of the Olympics as culture secretary, setting up Yemen peace talks as foreign secretary and his decision to impose a contract on junior doctors while health secretary.

The medics who went on strike over the contract have nothing but bitter memories about what they saw as his insulting suggestion that the NHS was not a “seven-day” service. Dr Rachel Clarke, one of the leading campaigners against the contract, poured scorn on the idea that the dispute could ever be considered a successful negotiation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Hunt broke an entire doctor workforce’: junior doctors on strike in April 2016. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images

“It takes a special kind of negotiating skill to take 45,000 of the most obedient, people-pleasing, hard-working professionals – England’s junior doctors – and drive 98% of us into voting to strike,” she says, arguing that Hunt could have stopped the industrial action by “simply listening to us”.

She criticises him for failing to try to understand his negotiating partners and raising the stakes when he should have been trying to lower them.

“If Mr Hunt seriously sees that as a triumph, as evidence of his superior negotiating skills, then he is stone deaf as well as dumb. He may have ‘won’ the battle, to borrow his aggressive language, but the bigger picture, the war, was lost. He broke an entire doctor workforce. The scars from that dispute will take a generation to heal,” she says.

Those who have worked closely with Hunt over the years say he enforced the junior doctors’ contract because he genuinely believed it would benefit patients, having decided improving safety would be his priority as health secretary.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hunt lacks the machiavellian reputation of his leadership rival Michael Gove, left. Photograph: Tim Anderson/Channel 4/PA

His leadership bid has gained endorsements from two high-profile safety campaigners, James Titcombe, who lost his son and says Hunt treated him as a “grieving dad rather than a troublemaker”, and Deb Hazeldine, who lost her mother and says Hunt “saw the bereaved daughter behind the campaigner”.

Sue Beeby, who is job-sharing as Hunt’s director of campaigns and started working with him 12 years ago, said his modus operandi is to focus on one or two priorities that he commits to delivering. She believes he would take this approach into No 10, along with a temperament that is “incredibly positive and so upbeat and so optimistic that actually it helps the team to gather round him and think you can do it”.

His corporate attitude to delivery is the thread running through his career, from founder of the multimillion-pound publishing business Hotcourses to the type of cabinet minister who likes to cite Black Box Thinking, a guide to becoming more successful by his friend Matthew Syed.

Numerous people who worked with him in the Department of Health recall Monday morning meetings where progress toward his goals was examined in a “command and control” strategy. Some believe Hunt came close to exceeding the boundaries of his role by interfering in the day-to-day running of the NHS and that he was too obsessed by media headlines.

“Everyone felt obliged to go to these meetings and it felt like they were verging on being too political about the NHS. It was Hunt’s way of controlling things even though some people were thinking he maybe shouldn’t be doing that,” says one former Whitehall staffer who now works in the health sector.

His aides from the time say it was essential to keep on top of a mammoth department where things could easily go wrong and become a crisis plastered over every front page. They also point to his political success in having avoided health becoming an even bigger election issue for the Conservatives and the negotiation to get a five-year NHS funding settlement.

Defending him against the charge of being insufficiently ruthless, his supporters say he should be viewed as a survivor, who has lasted nine years in cabinet throughout both David Cameron and Theresa May’s tenures.

If our backbenchers had gone against him, he would have been out of a job that day but he was completely in control Rob Wilson, Hunt’s former PPS

When May tried to get rid of him during an NHS winter crisis in 2018, he refused to be moved to business secretary and somehow ended up emerging from the meeting with an expanded portfolio covering social care as well.

He also managed to weather a grade-A political storm as culture secretary during the Leveson inquiry, when his contact with the Murdoch media empire came under scrutiny. Hunt had a quasi-judicial role in overseeing takeover of BSkyB by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

In the end, it was a close adviser, Adam Smith, who fell on his sword. Smith, who had been in contact with a News Corp lobbyist, later gave evidence that Hunt had initially supported him but changed his mind the next day, saying everyone “thinks you should go”.

Rob Wilson, the former Tory MP who was Hunt’s parliamentary private secretary, says he remained calm even when under the extraordinary pressure of newspapers and the opposition calling for him to be fired.

“If our backbenchers had gone against him, he would have been out of a job that day but he was completely in control and well prepared and he just kept level-headed and even-tempered about it all,” he says. “On another occasion we were off to the Leveson inquiry and the car was surrounded by paparazzi slamming into us taking pictures but he was just coolness personified.”

Coolness is not the impression given by an anecdote about Hunt told by the journalist Iain Martin, who once discovered him hiding behind a tree to avoid media reporters seeing him go into a dinner with News Corp’s James Murdoch in 2010.

Wilson says he “definitely saw a difference before and after Leveson” in Hunt, as “going through the fire” of a big political furore made him a better politician, enabling him to climb the ranks of the cabinet.

Some of those who worked with Hunt longer ago certainly express surprise that he has made it so far in government. Luke Turner, an author who worked at Hotcourses for three years and coined the description of him as an “affable lummox”, says no one could have guessed then that he would end up as an MP, let alone not far from No 10.

“He was kind of nice but had an utter lack of awareness and seeming lack of empathy with the people he employed doing endless late shifts with no overtime and getting told off for coming in one minute after 9am the next day and then giving you a company mouse mat as a thank you. He was very ‘Tim Nice But Dim’ [the Harry Enfield character], although maybe a bit smarter than that,” he says.

Other alumni of Hotcourses, a company that has reputedly made Hunt the richest member of the cabinet, say they scoffed at his recent claim to have gone through a “daily grind to stay alive” when starting his own business, as they only knew him as a decidedly well-to-do son of an admiral and former head boy of Charterhouse.

Friends say Hunt has found the best fit of his career so far at the Foreign Office, as a keen traveller who has spent periods of his life fascinated with different parts of the world, including Japan and Brazil. He has also taken advantage of the role to cosy up to serious global players, including Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump’s influential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

He has not been free of embarrassment in that job, wrongly telling Slovenia it had been a “vassal state of the Soviet Union” and accidentally saying his wife was Japanese rather than Chinese. His short stint in the job appears to have been flattered by the gaffe-strewn tenure of his predecessor, Johnson, and he has impressed colleagues with his natural diplomacy.

MPs convinced by Hunt believe he is at heart one of the “sensibles”, with a good chance of securing a Brexit deal while avoiding what he has termed the political suicide of no deal. He is now in second place with 43 endorsements, but his team still have a way to go before a place on the shortlist alongside Johnson is guaranteed.

The CV

Age: 52

Biographical details: Born in Surrey, Hunt was head boy at the £39,000-a-year Charterhouse boarding school before studying PPE at Oxford University.

Career trajectory: After Oxford, Hunt worked in consulting and spent two years teaching English in Japan. He went on to establish a PR firm, a directory publishing business and a charity for Aids orphans in Africa. He was elected MP for South West Surrey in May 2005, and joined the cabinet as culture secretary in 2010. He was appointed health secretary in 2012 and replaced Boris Johnson as foreign secretary in 2018.

High point: Outlasting the NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, to become the longest serving health secretary. His time in office was marked by a long battle with junior doctors, widespread cuts and parliamentary backlash over misleading pledges on NHS funding, making his longevity all the more remarkable.

Low point: Confusing his own wife’s nationality. During an official visit to Beijing in his first month as foreign secretary, Hunt incorrectly described his Chinese wife as Japanese. The gaffe came shortly after he had been criticised for failing to declare business interests in his purchase of seven luxury apartments on the south coast of England.

