Who is Jeremy Hunt’s wife Lucia Guo and do they have children? A look at Chancellor’s partner who he’s dubbed his ‘secret weapon’ and is 12 years his junior

• Jeremy Hunt is married to Lucia Guo and they share three children together
• READ MORE: Jeremy Hunt Budget 2023 LIVE: Key points and reaction as the Chancellor delivers a ‘budget for growth’ with a pensions and childcare shake-up

Jeremy Hunt today delivered his first Budget in the Commons – which promised to be a ‘budget for growth’ as the Government moves to revitalise the country’s flagging economy.

The Chancellor, 56, was supported earlier in the day by his wife and two of their children, who made a rare appearance in Downing Street as Mr Hunt left to deliver his Spring Budget.

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.

They were standing outside No12 in their school uniforms as he made the obligatory pose with his red ministerial box.

Later the family members were all spotted in the House of Commons watching the Budget from the public gallery.

The Chancellor, 56, was supported earlier in the day by his wife and two of their children, who made a rare appearance in Downing Street as Mr Hunt left to deliver his Spring Budget

Mr Hunt married his wife in 2009, with their relationship surviving even after he said his Chinese partner was Japanese during a visit to Beijing when he was Foreign Secretary in 2018.

He has previously called his wife – who is 12 years his junior – his ‘secret weapon’ during his Conservative Party leadership campaign in 2019.

She has remained quietly in the background with their three children, Jack, Anna and Eleanor, as he rose through the Cabinet ranks as Culture Secretary and Health Secretary and Foreign Secretary, before being parachuted into the Treasury last year to try to rescue Liz Truss’s prime ministerial career and calm the economy. 

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. 

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.

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. They were standing outside No12 in their school uniforms as he made the obligatory pose with his red ministerial box

Mr Hunt married his wife (pictured together) in 2009, with their relationship surviving even after he said his Chinese partner was Japanese during a visit to Beijing when he was Foreign Secretary in 2018

In 2014, Mr Hunt admitted that he feared for the future of his three children who are ‘half Chinese’ – because uncontrolled immigration risks causing ‘tensions’ in Britain.

He said he was worried that mounting anger against migrants would mean his Chinese wife and their children would face hostility for using the NHS.

He warned at the time that unless the level of immigration was under control, the UK would have to face up to the sort of ‘social divisions’ that had tarnished other countries.

He made his comments in a phone-in programme hosted by Iain Dale on LBC Radio.

‘I’d like to make one general point about immigration,’ he said. ‘My wife is Chinese and she obviously lives with me in London.

‘My children are half Chinese and I do not want them to grow up in a country where people look at immigrants and say it’s difficult for me to access NHS services because of people like you.

‘And that’s why it’s so important to have sensible, balanced, controlled immigration in this country. Because otherwise we’ll have social divisions, we’ll have tensions, which thankfully in this country we’ve avoided for many years unlike other countries.’

She has remained quietly in the background with their three children, Jack, Anna and Eleanor, as he rose through the Cabinet ranks as Culture Secretary and Health Secretary and Foreign Secretary, before being parachuted into the Treasury last year to try to rescue Liz Truss’s prime ministerial career and calm the economy. Pictured, Mr Hunt and his wife in 2019

Meanwhile, in 2021 it was reported that Ms Guo presented a TV show for China’s state-run media that has been accused of ‘whitewashing’ the Communist Party’s human rights abuses.

She appeared on China Hour, a series broadcast on Sky TV that showcases Chinese culture to a UK audience.

It is made by the state-owned China International TV Corporation and British-based Dove Media, in partnership with the Communist regime’s tourist office in London.

The programme featured reports on the effectiveness of China’s pandemic response and about the beauty of the Xinjiang region without mentioning it is the site of ‘re-education’ camps for its persecuted Muslim Uighur population. 

Ms Guo, who is originally from the city of Xi’an in central China, hosted a feature on the show called Signature Flowers of China. 

Human rights campaigners at the US research institute Freedom House last year accused China Hour of being part of the Chinese Communist Party’s international media web.

The programme has been praised in Beijing for its viewing figures while its reports on the pandemic have been credited with ‘playing a unique role in communicating the Chinese narration of the epidemic to the world’.

The couple (pictured in 2016) 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

But Sarah Cook, senior research analyst at Freedom House, said shows like China Hour were used to help Beijing whitewash the regime’s abuses.

‘It’s about embedding content from Chinese state media or made in collaboration with Chinese state media that local audiences are already watching,’ she said.

‘And that’s what’s very insidious about it. Yes, some of it is innocuous, but effectively it’s whitewashing a horrifically authoritarian and brutal regime.’

When Health Secretary, Mr Hunt led a delegation to China. The visit resulted in a deal that included a UK-China media production treaty and the launch of China Hour on Sky Channel 191.

In a statement, the makers of China Hour said the programme was a ‘commercial operation aimed at increasing programme sales for the China International TV Corporation and generating advertising revenue for both parties’.

They added that its editors have ‘decades of experience’ in reporting ‘national and international news in a balanced and impartial way’ but that, in any event, the programme ‘does not have a news remit and we stick to lifestyle programmes’.

Dove Media Group is part of the Global Chinese Media Co-operation Forum.

Mr Hunt and Ms Guo declined to comment at the time.

In 2019, Ms Guo revealed to The Mail On Sunday the affectionate nickname she calls her husband, who she says ‘is kind, he is always generous, he cares about his family and he is very strong’. 

She explained: ‘My grandma found it very hard to say “Jeremy” so she would just call him the “big mi”. Mi means “rice”, so I call him “big rice”.’ 

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