Jeremy Hunt in subtle Tory leadership move

The Tory leadership battle in good old going-down-the-drain Britain is up and running even though it has not been launched and Theresa May is still esconsed in 10 Downing Street. The latest person to make an interesting move is Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary. He was at the now notorious National Security Council meeting down in the bunker beneath the Cabinet Office last Tuesday in which the government made a decision, or at last Theresa May made a decision, to let Huawei put its technology into the next-generation 5G telecommunications systems. The leak that has caused such a scandal elicited the interesting information that Hunt was among four ministers who opposed the Huawei decision. Now the very young-looking Foreign Secretary has come out in public to confirm that he is dubious about the Huawei decision. He has said that the government needs to be very cautious about allowing Huawei to provide its 5G technology because of the inextricable link between any Chinese company operating abroad and China's intelligence services. Under Chinese law, companies in China are obliged to work closely with the intelligence services. That means if the spy chiefs tell them to use their technology to eavesdrop on or penetrate Western security systems they MUST do so. Huawei says this is nonsense but I know it's true!! Hunt whose remit includes being accountable for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) knows a thing or two about the intelligence world athough never the nitty-gritty operational details, and it's pretty clear MI6 bosses will have told him that Huawei is not to be trusted. The MI6 chief, Alex Younger, was also present at the leaked National Security Council meeting. Interestingly, when Younger appears at such Whitehall meetings he always wears a name tag which just has one letter on it - "C". The chief of MI6 is known in the service and everywhere in government as "C". "Hello, C", "Good morning, C". "How are you, C?" The head of MI6 has been known as C ever since the founding chief, Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming was spymaster. He was referred to as C after the first letter of his surname, and the letter stuck. So that is always Younger's name tag. Nice touch in my view! Anyway, Hunt will have had chats with C and so that's why he has made public his concerns. But it's also a smart leadership move. Hunt has got to be a front runner for Theresa May's job. Hunt by the way has fully recovered from his brief moment of sheer embarrassment when Jim Naughtie, then one of the leading BBC Radio 4 Today programme interviewers, got his h's and c's the wrong way round when he introduced him. Jeremy Hunt at that time was the Culture Secretary.