Political career
A member of the Labour Party, Hunt supported the party as an activist for several years before working on the party's staff. Hunt worked for the Labour Party at Millbank Tower during the 1997 general election; he also worked at the party headquarters during the following 2001 general election. During the 2005 general election he campaigned for Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow.
Hunt twice submitted his name unsuccessfully for selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate: Liverpool West Derby, where Stephen Twigg was selected (2007), and Leyton and Wanstead, where John Cryer was selected (2009).
Hunt was selected to contest the constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central on 1 April 2010, succeeding Labour's outgoing MP, Mark Fisher. Because the candidacy was filled just before the election, the shortlist was drawn up by Labour's ruling National Executive Committee selection panel, with none on the shortlist local to Stoke-on-Trent. This led to the secretary of the Constituency Labour Party, Gary Elsby, standing against Hunt as an independent candidate in protest. Despite the controversy of being "parachuted in" to the district, Hunt was elected with 38.8% of the vote. Although the election was the constituency's closest-fought contest in decades, Hunt still had a majority of 5,566 over his nearest rival.
Hunt was appointed a Shadow Education Minister in April 2013, replacing Karen Buck who advanced as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Ed Miliband. On 7 October 2013, Hunt was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet, replacing Stephen Twigg as Shadow Secretary of State for Education.
In February 2014, Hunt crossed an authorised University and College Union picket line at Queen Mary University of London to teach his students about "Marx, Engels and the Making of Marxism", defending himself on the grounds that although he was not a member of the union, he supported the right to strike and picket by those who had been ballotted. He was strongly criticised by West Bromwich East MP Tom Watson, who described Hunt's behaviour as "preposterous".
Hunt was re-elected in the 2015 election with a majority of 5,179. In 2015, Hunt ran for the leadership of the Labour Party, but dropped out after less than a week after he was nowhere near gathering the 35 nominations from MPs he needed to stand. On 12 September 2015, it became known he was leaving the shadow cabinet following Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader because of their "substantial political differences", as Hunt told the Press Association.
On 13 January 2017, he announced that he would be resigning as an MP in order to take up the post of Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He formally resigned, taking the post of Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, on 23 January 2017. His successor as MP, Gareth Snell, retained the seat for Labour in the subsequent by-election on 23 February 2017.
