Jeremy Hunt admits he failed to get a birthday card or present for his wife Lucia – and tried to escape the dog house by saying she ‘looks younger every year’ in his Autumn Statement speech

Jeremy Hunt has admitted he failed to get his wife a birthday card or present yesterday – and tried to escape the dog house by heaping praise on her in his Autumn Statement.

The Chancellor sparked laughter in the Commons yesterday when he kicked off his crucial fiscal package with a tribute to Lucia. 

The father-of-three told the House: ‘I come today with good news, it’s my wife’s birthday and unlike me she is looking younger every year.’

But in a round of interviews this morning, Mr Hunt conceded that was his only action to note his spouse’s turning 45.   

Jeremy Hunt has admitted he failed to get his wife a birthday card or present yesterday

On a visit to Beijing as Foreign Secretary in 2018, Mr Hunt inexplicably told his hosts that Lucia (pictured left) – with whom he has a son and two daughters – was Japanese rather than Chinese

He told LBC Radio: ‘I’m afraid I have not bought anything for my wife. I didn’t even get her a birthday card. I feel incredibly guilty.

‘What I did was publicly acknowledge her birthday to millions of people, which is something I haven’t done before. So, hopefully I will be able to make up for that at the weekend.’

Lucia was in the gallery at Parliament to watch her husband’s speech. But it is not the first time Mr Hunt has risked the wrath of his long-suffering wife.  

On a visit to Beijing as Foreign Secretary in 2018 he inexplicably told his hosts that Lucia – with whom he has a son and two daughters – was Japanese rather than Chinese.

‘My wife is Japanese – my wife is Chinese. That’s a terrible mistake to make,’ he said.

Mr Hunt married Lucia Guo, who is 12 years his junior, in 2009. 

He called her his ‘secret weapon’ during his Conservative Party leadership campaign in 2019.

She remained quietly in the background with their three children, Jack, Anna and Eleanor, as he rose through the Cabinet ranks as Culture Secretary, Health Secretary and Foreign Secretary, before being parachuted into the Treasury last year amid Liz Truss’s meltdown. 

The couple met 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. 

Lucia Guo, 44, brought their son Jack and one of the couple’s two daughters out of No11, official residence of the Chancellor, to see their father off as he headed to Parliament to deliver the Budget in March

In 2019, when he ran against Boris Johnson to become Tory leader, Ms Guo described how he wooed 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. 

Mr Hunt, the son of Admiral Sir Nicholas Hunt, proposed during a country walk close to his parents’ home in Shere, Surrey. 

She told the Mail at the time: ‘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 to Ms Guo’s home city of Xian so Mr Hunt could ask her father for her hand in marriage, with Lucia translating his nervous request. They married in China in a traditional Chinese ceremony.

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