'Another galaxy' Voters in Surrey on Hunt's idea of salaries

“I felt like I must be from another galaxy when I heard it,” Merve Topaloğlu says of the chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s suggestion that collecting £100,000 a year is “not a huge salary”.

- Rupert Neate

“I can’t imagine how anyone could say £100,000 is not a huge amount,” adds the 34-year-old former Turkish reporter, who runs the Journalist, a cafe on Godalming’s High Street right in the heart of Hunt’s Surrey constituency. “The annual profit from my whole cafe isn’t close to £100,000.”

“Politicians like to tell us that they are in it with us,” Topaloğlu says. “But if he can say that, it shows he doesn’t know what life is like for many of us living on a lot, lot less than £100,000.”

Hunt, who has been the MP for South West Surrey since 2005, made the comments in response to a call from a constituent living in the market town who had complained that the government’s free childcare scheme was not available to families with a parent earning more than £100,000.

“That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay,” the chancellor said on X.

Opposition MPs, campaigners and pundits immediately criticised Hunt as being out of touch and pointed out that the average UK full-time salary, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), was £34,963 and anything higher than £81,357 put a person in the top 5% of earners. Estimates by the consultancy Electoral Calculus put the median salary in the constituency at £56,606, in Godalming (population: 23,000) the average is about £34,000, according to the town council.

When challenged further this week, Hunt said: “What sounds like a large salary – when you have house prices averaging around £670,000 in my area and you’ve got a mortgage and childcare costs – it doesn’t go as far as you might think.”