Sunak, Hunt and a special relationship

The dynamic between a PM and chancellor is notoriously hard to manage. Are they even friends?

- Anne McElvoy

FOR a guide to the relationship between a prime minister and chancellor, look first to the uncomfortably close living arrangements in Downing Street. Rishi Sunak's determination to keep Jeremy Hunt as his "Mr Stability" Chancellor is evidenced by allowing the former foreign and health secretary to occupy the much larger flat above No 11 while squeezing himself and his brood into the smaller No 10 quarters.

That is uncosy proximity for two men with growing families - but useful as they burn the midnight oil together in the run-up to the crucial Autumn Statement next Thursday, which will lay out how the "rescue squad" of Hunt and Sunak intend to fill a £50 billion black hole - and mitigate the potential devastating impacts for London and the country of a deep recession. If Sunak looked his usual spry self, dodging hostile questions at PMQs yesterday, Hunt, who usually looks a lot younger than his 56 years, had noticeably acquired a deep vertical line of worry-furrow down his boyish brow. "The scale of what they are dealing with is forbidding," says a former chancellor.

"But they are the best team this Government could field to take it on." Their cheek-by-jowl living arrangements mean Hunt is heir to Carrie Johnson's controversial interiors upgrade in the No 11 flat (I hope the Hunts like the green and dark red chromatics and swirls of Lulu Lyttle's designs). Hunt might miss the spring floor ballroom he has installed at his home in south-west London - he is an accomplished dancer, though possibly not so much right now.