Yet another broadcaster replaces crucial consonant in health secretary’s surname

It is a verbal landmine that has gone off at Sky News, BBC Television and the BBC’s flagship morning radio show.

And once again, Jeremy Hunt’s name has been taken in vain, with a presenter on the Today programme mispronouncing his surname by replacing a crucial consonant.

Justin Webb made the error while reading out a story about the health and social care secretary during a review of newspaper coverage.

“The paper says that health secretary Jeremy Cunt ... Hunt is understood to favour a cap on social care.”

Responding later to a tweet asking why presenters on the programme couldn’t help replacing the H with a C, Webb claimed he had made an “important swerve”, suggesting he had left off the final “t”, but social media had already lit up.

Another BBC broadcaster, Jim Naughtie, has previously recalled his colleagues on the Today programme throwing up their hands in mock surrender after an infamous slip of the tongue as he introduced the then culture secretary.

Naughtie said the late BBC newsreader Rory Morrison had come to the rescue with a faultless delivery of the morning news bulletin that followed the gaffe in December 2010.

“I was there with lots of bits of paper and someone was shoving headlines in front of me and I said, ‘After the news we’ll be talking to Jeremy Cunt’ … And all I could see behind the glass were arms going up in the air, as in ‘We surrender’,” said Naughtie. “And the guy who was passing the news bulletins to the late Rory Morrison went under the table [laughing].”

Other broadcasters to have made the same slip over Hunt’s surname include the Sky News health and science correspondent Thomas Moore, the BBC political journalist Ellie Price and the Sky anchor Claudia-Liza Armah.