Jeremy Thorpe 1,166. After the 1966 election, Grimond confided to senior party officials that he wished soon to step down from the leadership. Thorpe was now the senior Liberal MP after Grimond, and the party's highest-profile member, although Timothy Beaumont, chairman of the party's organising committee, noted in his diary: "I am pretty certain that he has little popularity within the Parliamentary Party". When Grimond finally resigned, on 17 January 1967, an election to replace him was arranged to take place within 48 hours, leaving little time for manoeuvring. The 12 Liberal MPs formed the whole electorate; after the first ballot, Thorpe
Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (born 1 November 1966) is a British Conservative Party politician serving as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs since 2018 and Member of Parliament (MP) for South West Surrey since 2005. Hunt identifies as a one-nation conservative, and has been associated with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies. He has been characterised as a "metropolitan liberal" by the "Financial Times". Hunt was born in Kennington and studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. He was first elected to the