Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today is a politician who must surely wonder what might have been.

In the summer of 2019, Jeremy Hunt ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party

after the Brexit-induced demise of Theresa May.

Mr Hunt, a former health minister and the then serving Foreign

Secretary, lost out to Boris Johnson. So it is that Mr. Johnson has led the UK through the

COVID pandemic. Grappling with a public health crisis that has seen more than 55,000 people

die, and the economy suffer the most dramatic contraction in living memory.

Mr Hunt, meanwhile, remained in the House of Commons and became chair of the Parliamentary Health

Committee, responsible for holding the government to account for its COVID strategy.

So how has the UK done compared with the rest of the world?

Has the pandemic exposed weaknesses in the country's systems and in the current leadership?

Well, Jeremy Hunt joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you.

One of your current parliamentary responsibilities is to hold the government to account,

to scrutinise it on health policy. Do you think Boris Johnson's government has a record to be proud of when it comes to COVID-19?

Well, we're still in the middle of the pandemic, so it's probably too early to make that assessment.

But we're certainly not amongst the best.

And I think the interesting thing, if you look at Europe, is that France, Spain, Italy and the UK

have all had pretty terrible pandemics. Germany, slightly better, Norway, Denmark, slightly better.

But around the world, the real dividing line is between the East Asian

...