'The gloves are off' as Jeremy Hunt takes on Boris Johnson to lead UK

Boris Johnson (left) and Jeremy Hunt are competing for the votes of about 160,000 Conservative Party members, who will choose a new leader, and prime minister, this month. PHOTO: REUTERS

BOURNEMOUTH, ENGLAND (NYTIMES) - His shirt sleeves rolled up, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt bounded into the hall, ignored the lectern and headed straight to the front of the stage to make his pitch that he should lead the country out of its paralysing Brexit maze.

But right from the start, Mr Hunt was playing catch-up. He is one of two candidates to be Britain's next prime minister, and his rival and predecessor as foreign secretary, Mr Boris Johnson, had already won cheers from this audience with his crowd-pleasing, pro-Brexit bombast.

And, earlier, Mr Johnson had grabbed eye-catching headlines by claiming that he would beat Mr Hunt in a naked mud-wrestling contest.

Tall, lean and fit, the serious-minded Mr Hunt would probably more than hold his own against his less-toned opponent in that contest, but defeating the theatrical Mr Johnson for the Conservative leadership is another matter.

The two men are competing for the votes of about 160,000 Conservative Party members, who will choose a new leader, and prime minister, this month, as the Conservatives hold a working majority in Parliament.

For Mr Hunt, 52, this is the opportunity he had always hoped would come. "I have been waiting for this moment for 30 years of my life," he told the BBC.

But the moment falls at a tricky time.

Reasonable, cautious and wholesome to the point of blandness, Mr Hunt is the opposite of 55-year-old Johnson, whose charisma and bumbling, confected persona have made him the clear favourite in the contest, despite an early setback when police were summoned to the home of his girlfriend after a loud argument.

After considerable deliberations, Mr Johnson decided to campaign for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. That cause is embraced with virtually cultlike certitude by almost all Conservative members now, and Mr Johnson has doubled down, promising to leave the European Union with or without a deal Oct 31.

He says - improbably, in the view of most analysts - that by taking a tougher stand than Prime Minister Theresa May did, and by believing in the Brexit project, he will persuade a resolute EU to offer concessions it has so far ruled out.

Mr Hunt is a former Remainer whose pitch is less emotionally appealing to many Tory members: He is, he says, the best negotiator, someone with a grasp of detail and the man who can be trusted to deliver Brexit and avoid the inevitable economic pain of withdrawal without an agreement.

Yet, the party faithful doubt his commitment to a Brexit at all costs.

In Bournemouth, England, one hardliner heckled him, demanding that any member of his team should be willing to support a no-deal departure. A couple of days later, Mr Hunt hardened his stance by saying he would decide at the end of September whether Brexit talks were going anywhere and, if not, would prepare for a disorderly withdrawal and compensate farmers and the fishing industry for the damage it would do.

Knowing he has ground to make up, Mr Hunt has risked his reputation for prudence by making some big spending pledges and by hinting that he would try to end a ban on fox hunting, only to retreat when challenged on that hot-button issue.

As the underdog, Mr Hunt has targeted Mr Johnson's reluctance to take part in TV debates, his preference for carefully selected interviews and his contradictory - sometimes misleading - statements about Brexit.

Mr Johnson's avoidance of media scrutiny amounted to "cowardice", Mr Hunt said of his rival, adding later that he had "got some important facts wrong" and that only a head-to-head televised debate would give party members the chance to decide if Mr Johnson understood the issues around Brexit.

"The gloves are off," said Dr Paul Whiteley, professor of government at the University of Essex, who noted that Mr Hunt's taunt of cowardice had forced Mr Johnson to come out into the open and submit himself to more interviews.

"What he has done already successfully is to upturn Boris Johnson's strategy," Prof Whiteley said, though he added that provoking Mr Johnson had risks because "he has made him come out and retaliate".

Indeed, Mr Johnson successfully postponed a television debate until Tuesday night (July 9), and many party members are already thought to have voted with mail-in ballots.

In terms of charisma, there is no real contest. One Guardian journalist has likened Mr Hunt to a British Airways cabin steward. Another wrote that, performing for pro-Brexit party members alongside Mr Johnson, Mr Hunt resembled "an earnest parent at a children's party handing out carrot sticks when all eyes are on the chocolate cake".

Yet, while Prof Whiteley believes it would be an earthquake were Mr Hunt to win, he notes that he is no pushover and sees him as a "polite but steely figure".

"He has a ruthless streak in him, and the accusation of cowardice is a case in point," he added. "He talks softly, but carries a big stick."

There has been some good news for the foreign secretary, including an opinion poll that rated him higher as a leader among voters in general (as opposed to voting party members) and the endorsement of influential former Conservative Party leader William Hague, who described Mr Hunt as the candidate who would "make the better prime minister and have the best chance of avoiding calamity over Brexit".

Like Mr Johnson, Mr Hunt is a product of Britain's elite educational system. The son of a senior naval officer, he attended Charterhouse, an expensive private school, then Oxford, where he was president of the Conservative Association.

He spent almost two years in Japan, learning the language while teaching English (he still makes a point of visiting people he knew at the time). Mr Hunt's early efforts to export marmalade to Japan floundered before he set up a successful educational business, Hotcourses.

That made Mr Hunt the richest member of the Cabinet and was also the reason he met his wife, Lucia Guo. The couple married in 2009 in a traditional, pre-Chinese-revolution ceremony in Lijiang, with Mr Hunt walking through the streets as his bride was carried in a sedan chair.

A series of tasks had to be completed before he could carry away his bride, including singing, performing 25 push-ups and finding her shoes. "I had to do three kowtows to the sun," Mr Hunt told The Guardian.

A decade later, the couple have three children, and Mr Hunt's pet name at home is "big rice", his wife recently told The Mail on Sunday.

In London, his political career was accelerated by then prime minister David Cameron, who brought Mr Hunt into the Cabinet as culture secretary in 2010, though not without some setbacks. Mr Hunt's close ties to the Murdoch empire raised accusations of conflict of interest during its bid for full control of broadcaster BSkyB.

As a long-serving health secretary, Mr Hunt waged a fierce dispute with junior doctors, but on the positive side, a long-predicted winter crisis in the health service never materialised. Promoted to foreign secretary in 2018, and taking over after Mr Johnson's widely criticised tenure, Mr Hunt has performed well, though not without some slips.

Most famously, and bizarrely, he referred to his Chinese wife as Japanese. In a crude pitch to right-wingers in the Conservative Party, he likened the EU to the Soviet Union. And he incorrectly described Slovenia as a former Soviet vassal state (it was, in fact, within the former Yugoslavia, which was outside the Iron Curtain).

But Mr Alistair Burt, a lawmaker and supporter who worked with Mr Hunt in government, describes him as an effective Cabinet minister and manager.

"He's collaborative; there were a couple of areas where we disagreed, where my natural caution would have led to a different outcome, but I got no sense that he holds grudges against those who have different views," Mr Burt said.

Yet, according to opinion surveys, Tory members are drawn less to Mr Hunt's quiet competence than to the pyrotechnics offered by Mr Johnson.

In Bournemouth, Mr Ted Watts, a chartered surveyor from the nearby town of Sway, described Mr Hunt as a "great guy, and a more sensible option than Boris".

But Ms Tina Elwood, a local property developer, said she was more inclined to vote for Mr Johnson, someone who could banish the dullness she saw in Mrs May's leadership and deliver the Brexit she believes in.

"I do really like Jeremy Hunt," Ms Elwood said, before confessing that she is "a bit worried about him being Theresa May in trousers".

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