Perhaps what aggravated and demoralised doctors and nurses more than anything else, was Hunt’s audacious use of tactical shroud-waving. Previous Tory health ministers frequently accused their opponents of using deaths to make political points. But Hunt repurposed this trick against his opponents, veering close to accusing anyone standing in his way of being responsible for “avoidable deaths”.

Announcing his intention to impose a new contract on doctors, Hunt claimed “around 6,000 people lose their lives every year because we do not have a proper 7-day service in hospitals… No one could possibly say that this was a system built around the needs of patients – and yet when I pointed this out to the BMA they told me to ‘get real.’ I simply say to the doctors’ union that I can give them 6,000 reasons why they, not I, need to ‘get real’.”

Experts took apart Hunt’s claims, showing that his use of weekend mortality data was “a shambles”. Hunt’s suggestion that the BMA was “turning medicine into a Monday to Friday profession” alienated the doctors who do currently provide 24/7 emergency care (check out #ImInWorkJeremy), and he was even accused by doctors of having put at least 14 patients at risk by incorrectly implying that 24/7 emergency care isn't available.

Margaret McCartney, a GP, author and broadcaster, told me, “It's dangerous to keep on misrepresenting data even when experts have told you that you are making a mistake… Hunt’s claim about weekend deaths, used to justify changes to the junior doctor contracts, has been debunked (patients admitted at the weekend tend to be sicker).”

The shroud-waving was a tactic he’d already deployed effectively against his first parliamentary opponent, Andy Burnham, and indeed against interviewers. Questions about failures to meet targets on waiting times, when not being excused by the “ageing population”, were often met with impassioned statements about patients failed by the NHS in Mid Staffs, Morecombe Bay, Gosport and elsewhere – a strategy he also deployed consistently in media interviews (and still is doing, as in his recent interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and when he was challenged on LBC by an angry doctor in the same week).

He’d deployed the tactic too, against Lewisham campaigners, when his administrator’s report suggested closing the hospital and related changes would “save around 100 lives a year”.

Indeed Hunt has made the “patients’ champion” persona his own. He recently told the New Statesman that he’d made patient safety his “life’s mission” and that when he leaves front-line politics, “I want to write a book on patient safety. I would like to do for patient safety what Al Gore has done for climate change…”

In reality, Jeremy Hunt, having wielded the Francis report into the Mid Staffs scandal as a weapon from the get-go, junked most of its key recommendations.

Having promised in 2013 to bring in minimum standards of safety for ratios of nurses to patients, two years later he and Simon Stevens quietly tore these promises up as too “mechanistic”, to the concern of the report author Robert Francis. Hunt’s repeated promise to put the patient at the centre of everything the NHS did, including in its constitution (another Francis report recommendation) was similarly junked a year after its headline-garnering work was done. Promises to protect whistleblowers resulted in just another toothless system. Moves towards openness were undermined by increased reliance on the market and private sector provision, with nothing done to address the destructive ethos of competition between and even within hospitals that Francis had identified as a key part of the problem at Mid Staffs.

Phil Hammond, the doctor and broadcaster who has written extensively on patient safety, told me: “Hunt developed a selective interest in some aspects of patient safety… so although he will be able to cherry-pick to make it look as if some aspects of safety got better.... Hunt repeatedly refused to introduce mandatory safe staffing levels… There are of course some brilliant NHS staff who are very dedicated to safety, who have improved the situation in their particular hospital or GP practice, but I don’t really see how Hunt can take credit for that. Finally, despite his strong words about no more coverups in the NHS and better support for NHS whistleblowers, many of them say the situation hasn’t improved and they are still not being listened to and are being persecuted.”

So much for Hunt’s “patients’ champion” persona.

And of course, much else that happened to the NHS under his watch wasn’t very good for patients, either – in terms of safety, but also access to healthcare, privatisation and rationing. And this is where the last of his strategies came in very useful.

Hiding the facts, playing with the figures

Part of Hunt’s pitch is that he is “on top of the detail”. In reality, he has worked to make it harder or impossible for the rest of us to check-up on the detail. Once A&E waiting targets were routinely being missed, he simply stopped publishing weekly data on the failures and dropped hints the target would soon be dropped. Similarly, in response to regularly missing the target on maximum 18 week waiting times for planned operations, that target was quietly dropped. In response to alarming headlines regarding the rising number of hospitals declaring ‘black alert’ (unable to guarantee life-saving emergency care, and having to divert patients elsewhere), the ‘solution’ was to ban hospitals from using the term ‘black alert’.

In June 2017, Hunt was summoned to the Commons to answer questions about whether he had sought to cover up a damning report that found a private contractor had failed to process over 700,000 pieces of medical correspondence, a scandal that reportedly may have harmed the health of at least 1,788 patients and has so far cost £6.6 million. A year later he was criticised by charities for waiting up to four months to tell the public about another error that meant 450,000 women hadn’t received breast screening invitations and – as Hunt admitted in parliament – 270 may have died as a result.

Under Hunt, the Department of Health routinely refused to answer parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests about which private companies the NHS’s money is going to on the basis that they didn’t centrally collate it. And it was also reluctant to release raw, uncollated spending data, being the last department to do so and only giving in after a petition to release it. Inconveniently timed information on the financial crisis engulfing hospitals was tucked away from view, too.

In terms of money, in 2015 the UK Statistics Authority told Hunt to stop saying NHS spending was up, and a year later a committee of MPs found he had misled them on this point and he admitted he had played with the time periods.

And what of Hunt’s defining claim in the leadership campaign – that he’s “the person who secured a historic funding boost for the NHS” just before leaving office in July 2018? While Hunt claims the deal is “one of the single biggest increases in funding for a public service in our history”, numerous experts have pointed out that most NHS increases are generally “the biggest yet” (due to inflation), that this increase (at most, 3.4% a year) doesn’t match the level of actual health inflation and higher need, and hasn’t made up for the shortfall in funding in preceding years. In the words of the National Audit Office, the latest funding boost is “inadequate” and leaves the NHS “unsustainable”. Also worrying, it turns out (in the Long Term Plan) that Hunt’s deal is conditional on the NHS achieving significant savings through the use of technology (something many experts are dubious about), reducing face-to-face appointments by one third, and also on there being no additional pressures from the social care sector (that’s currently collapsing). And this 3.4% doesn’t apply to capital expenditure, staff training and pay, or public health budgets – all of which remain up in the air until the forthcoming spending review. Theresa May promised the “Brexit dividend” would fund the increases. Quite how that’s going to pan out, is anyone’s guess. As a Nuffield Trust health expert put it, “the NHS would be wise to hang onto the receipt for this particular birthday present."

Conclusion

There are many more facts I could throw at you to help you see Hunt’s legacy. Public satisfaction with the NHS fell during Hunt’s time in office, for example. Both maternal deaths at childbirth and infant mortality started to worsen again towards the end of Hunt's tenure, after decades of improvement. And one last statistic is perhaps the most damning. In his recent interview with the New Statesman, he quoted Stephen Pinker saying that “life expectancy has gone up!”. While this is true globally, the story in Britain is different. Since 2015, projections for life expectancy in the UK have fallen by more than a year.

It tells you much about British politics that a man with Hunt’s record was promoted to foreign secretary, and now stands a small chance of becoming prime minister. It tells us a huge amount about the state of the British press that Hunt is treated as a serious candidate, taking on the Johnsonian clown. And it’s worth remembering, whichever of them wins, that they will face the same advantages Hunt has always had: an establishment that doesn't care too much what happens to ordinary people's services, so long as no-one makes a fuss, and a pliant media, always ready to believe the spin of some old public school boy.