Home NEWS Jeremy Hunt’s wife Lucia reveals her pet name for him is ‘Mr Big Rice’

Jeremy Hunt’s wife Lucia reveals her pet name for him is ‘Mr Big Rice’

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Jeremy Hunt’s wife Lucia reveals her pet name for him is ‘Mr Big Rice’

With Boris Johnson threatening to open up an unassailable lead in the Tory leadership race, his closest rival, Jeremy Hunt, has unleashed his ‘secret weapon’ – his wife Lucia.

She giggles as she explains why ‘Big Rice’, her pet name for the Foreign Secretary, can still overhaul Mr Johnson and become our next Prime Minister.

‘He is kind, he is always generous, he cares about his family and he is very strong,’ says Chinese-born Lucia. ‘He never hides from challenges.’

Which is a good job, as her husband was thumped in Thursday’s first round of voting, with Boris winning 114 MP votes to Hunt’s 43. His only consolation was beating Michael Gove into third place in the wake of the cocaine scandal which enveloped the Environment Secretary last weekend.

Lucia Hunt giggles as she explains why ‘Big Rice’, her pet name for the Foreign Secretary, can still overhaul Mr Johnson and become our next Prime Minister

Despite the near-knockout size of Mr Johnson’s lead, Mr Hunt comes out fighting today by portraying himself as the ‘insurgent’ in the race and urging MPs not to allow Mr Johnson to romp into Downing Street without being properly ‘stress tested’ by public debate.

Pointedly, Mr Hunt says that, if he wins, he will reinstate the monthly Prime Ministerial press conferences to ensure that he is subjected to proper ‘scrutiny’. And he confidently offers up a flagship policy proposal for a Hunt administration: tax breaks for ‘granny flats’ to encourage greater family involvement in childcare and help for elderly relatives.

The plan was partly inspired by his experiences visiting his wife’s homeland, where it is commonplace for several generations of a family to live together.

It is clear that Lucia has been a highly significant – and until now, largely unheralded – influence on her husband. Before Thursday’s voting started, the Foreign Secretary tweeted that it ‘felt a bit like the morning of my wedding’ because he didn’t ‘quite know how it will unfold’.

The couple spoke to The Mail on Sunday in the private quarters of their magnificent grace-and-favour apartment in London’s Carlton Gardens, where personal touches such as books and family portraits jostle for space with works from the Government art collection.

A doll knitted for his daughter by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British mother who is on hunger strike in prison in Iran over spying charges which she vehemently denies, stares down from their mantelpiece. When Mr Johnson was Foreign Secretary, he torpedoed her defence by inaccurately claiming that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists.

Lucia was thrust into the spotlight last year when Mr Hunt accidentally described her as ‘Japanese’ – the nationality of one of his previous girlfriends – on a trip to Asia.

He has previously called her his ‘secret weapon’, but she has remained quietly in the shadows with their three children as he rose through the Cabinet ranks as Culture Secretary and Health Secretary before succeeding Mr Johnson at the Foreign Office

Unlike many Westminster marriages, the couple’s mutual affection looks sincere and unforced as they discuss meeting in 2008 when Lucia was a 30-year-old student recruiter at Warwick university – and a client of the Hotcourses online education business which turned Mr Hunt, then aged 41, into a multi-millionaire. They were married within a year.

The couple spoke to The Mail on Sunday in the private quarters of their magnificent grace-and-favour apartment in London’s Carlton Gardens, where personal touches such as books and family portraits jostle for space with works from the Government art collection

As Mr Hunt puts it: ‘She was a customer, and I was allowed to mix work with pleasure to great success’.

LUCIA describes him as an ardent suitor, wooing her with tea and biscuits, asking for her email address and utilising his perks as Shadow Culture Secretary to take her to a ‘freebie’ performance of Othello at the Donmar Warehouse in London.

Hunt, the son of Admiral Sir Nicholas Hunt, proposed in impeccable middle class fashion during a country walk close to his parents’ Surrey home.

Lucia recalls: ‘He asked me to put my hands in a tree. I said, no, it looked like a fox hole and I thought he’d do some trick on me. He said, there’s something in there for you. It was a ring!’

The couple then flew out together to Mrs Hunt’s home city of Xian so Mr Hunt could ask her father for her hand in marriage, with Lucia translating his nervous request. ‘He started to tell him how we met and I explained to my father everything. I had to translate everything,’ she said. ‘My father started crying’.

As Lucia veers into more intimate territory – offering to disclose their nicknames for each other – the Foreign Secretary tenses palpably. ‘No, no, no, I don’t think we should go there,’ he says.

Undeterred, she explains: ‘My grandma found it very hard to say ‘Jeremy’ so she would just call him the ‘big mi’. Mi means ‘rice’, so I call him ‘big rice’.’ So what does he call her? ‘Precious’.

As Lucia veers into more intimate territory – offering to disclose their nicknames for each other – the Foreign Secretary tenses palpably. ‘No, no, no, I don’t think we should go there,’ he says

When she is asked about Boris, she is the one who tenses, giving the ambiguous response: ‘I think he is a funny character.’

Funny or not, Mr Hunt has the challenge of his lifetime convincing his Commons colleagues to allow him to join Mr Johnson on the ballot of two final names – and then an even greater challenge trying to persuade the electorate of Tory party members to overlook his rival’s star qualities.

Also problematic is the fact that more than two-thirds of members backed Brexit, while Mr Hunt voted Remain, and even flirted with the idea of a second referendum shortly after the 2016 vote, although he has since tacked towards a much more muscular pro-Brexit position.

While Boris has said that the UK should leave the UK on October 31, ‘deal or no deal’, Mr Hunt argues that No Deal should be pursued only as an absolute last resort.

Did he expect Mr Johnson to win by such a margin on Thursday? ‘Boris is the frontrunner, he’s always been the frontrunner. In politics there’s always a bandwagon effect, there are a lot of colleagues who just want to back the person who’s going to win and so I wasn’t surprised,’ he said.

The Charterhouse and Oxford-educated Cabinet veteran insists: ‘I am the insurgent in this race. When the country is in a Brexit crisis and Boris is thought by the country to be the leader of the Brexit campaign then, curious though it is, the Foreign Secretary of this country is the insurgent candidate.

‘I am in it to win it because we have to give the country better choices given the crisis that we’re in now.’

Mr Hunt insists that the way out of the Brexit Gordian knot which suffocated Theresa May is through ‘proper negotiating skills’ to secure a deal which is acceptable to Parliament by eliminating the hated Northern Irish backstop which could keep the UK tied to EU rules indefinitely.

‘I think that Boris’s Brexit proposal is profoundly defeatist. Boris is basically saying there is a hard stop on October 31; that we’ve got to have a No Deal Brexit. The only alternative to that would be a General Election.’

MR HUNT adds: ‘When I talk to other European leaders they understand why we have difficulty with the backstop and they say, “Come with your proposals and we’ll consider them.” I have always said that, if we had to leave with No Deal and that was the only way to leave, then I’d accept that, but given the risks of No Deal to businesses, to farmers, to manufacturers, to the Union, I am asking myself are these the best choices that we have right now as a country or could we do better?

While Boris has said that the UK should leave the UK on October 31, ‘deal or no deal’, Mr Hunt argues that No Deal should be pursued only as an absolute last resort

‘The first people internationally that I’d want to go and meet would be the Irish government because in the end the single biggest obstacle to a Brexit in Europe is over the Irish border.’

Mr Hunt would not emulate his rival Rory Stewart by taking No Deal off the table and setting up a ‘rebel parliament’ to thwart any attempt to railroad one through: ‘I think when you’re negotiating you keep every option on the table but Rory’s run a brilliant campaign and I admire him for that.’

He sees a chance to outmanoeuvre his rival in the growing narrative that Mr Johnson is ‘hiding’ by avoiding interviews and skipping today’s Channel 4 leaders debate in case he makes a gaffe. Describing the ‘submarine approach’ as ‘fundamentally flawed’, Mr Hunt says: ‘This is auditioning for the most important job in the country, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

‘You will be under immense scrutiny from day one in that job and, if you run away from taking part in TV debates, if you don’t appear on the Today programme, if you just restrict what you do to friendly newspaper interviews, then you are not allowing people to see how you perform under pressure.

‘We are risking a rerun of 2016 [when Theresa May entered No 10] where people felt it was a coronation’.

Much of the surge in Mr Johnson’s support has been attributed to fears by MPs that they will lose their seats to a surge by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party unless Mr Johnson is at the helm.

Mr Hunt says his rival ‘may be better at winning votes off Farage but he’s worse at losing votes to the Lib Dems – and there are lots of Conservatives who are fighting the Lib Dems every day’.

The main fears about Mr Johnson relate to his competence. Did Mr Hunt have to smooth feathers after his spell at the Foreign Office?

‘I don’t think it would be a surprise to anyone to say that, inside the Foreign Office and outside the Foreign Office, Boris is a Marmite character and there are many people inside the Foreign Office who don’t share his views on Europe.’

However, if he and Lucia make it into Downing Street, Mr Johnson would be guaranteed a place in his Cabinet. ‘I would certainly give him a job and I hope he would take it,’ he said. ‘After this bruising process we have got to be one team.’ 

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