No one wants to be the person who leads a political party from a landslide victory to a landslide defeat. So this week’s conference speech mattered for Rishi Sunak. He could have set out an overarching vision and political narrative on which he wants the Conservative party to fight the 2024 general election. Instead, in Manchester, he rolled the dice and took a risk.
Sunak’s strategy was to tell voters that politics has been broken for 30 years, and that he alone is the antidote, the change candidate. He selectively trashed his own party’s record in office wherever he felt necessary; a potential gift to every opposing party. You could be forgiven for assuming that fixing our broken politics means constitutional or fundamental political change – reform of the voting system or the House of Lords, or bold new steps on devolution. But instead, Sunak’s solution was far closer to home. “I am the embodiment of the change,” he seemed to say.
Worryingly for any “red wall” Conservative, his speech entirely brushed over the levelling up manifesto promise that helped the Conservatives win a landslide election victory under Boris Johnson in 2019. It was a mandate to improve long-term prospects for communities and families in “left behind” areas of the country, with many red wall voters lending their votes to the Tories on the basis that the party would deliver. Instead, Sunak chose not only to cut the biggest levelling up project at the heart of that strategy – the HS2 leg to Manchester – but, like a political punch to the face, he chose to announce the move in Manchester itself.
The prime minister talked of aspiration, but people want more to look forward to in life than a continuation of the £2 bus fare cap, a phased ban on smoking and the filling of potholes. Levelling up and improving social mobility – now at a 50-year low, according to recent Institute for Fiscal Studies research – is supposed to be about improving life chances for the long term and boosting the prospects of children. Rather than making small policy tweaks, it is about systemic change that would lift up whole communities and areas. Looking at the dire polling numbers, Sunak may think voters ungrateful, that they have ignored the benefits of his technocratic approach; but there are no grand political prizes for simply reducing bus fares or pledging that roads will get the maintenance they need.
People across our country are aiming higher for themselves and their families, and they will vote for a government that shares that level of ambition. A huge opportunity was missed to address this ambition when the government failed to fund Sir Kevan Collins’ crucial post-Covid education recovery plan. But at conference, the contemporary Tory party had other things on its mind. Sunak’s speech reflected much of the broader debate in Manchester. It is a party now most comfortable setting out a seemingly random selection of what it’s against: HS2, “woke” science, smoking, rip-off degrees. This is bound up with toxic rhetoric on migration and has even stretched to making bizarre claims on meat taxes or 15-minute cities, simply to create electoral dividing lines. For a significant number of activists and parliamentarians, it is not a version of the party they are comfortable with or want to see. “Here we go again,” one senior Tory MP told me, as they expressed their annoyance at the way in which “the party seems to set itself against the centre ground”.
In denigrating his own party’s record, and breaking a key promise on levelling up, Sunak’s risky political strategy has left the door open to Keir Starmer and Labour at their conference in Liverpool this coming week. It’s clear Britain needs more than Sunak’s scrapped or banned list. And if Labour is to succeed where Sunak hasn’t, Starmer needs a clear hypothesis that is more than just an articulation of our problems. The country is crying out for a bold vision and real solutions – a picture of what a better, fairer Britain really looks like, with a clear, credible and, above all, ambitious policy platform that can deliver it. That will make more sense to people than Conservative leadership doublespeak.
But for all that voters are out of love with the Conservatives, it still feels like Starmer hasn’t sealed the deal with them either. Labour conference will be a pivotal five days for the opposition leader.
Whatever else is on his agenda, Starmer should have the courage to reverse the prime minister’s damaging cut to the HS2 Manchester leg. There remains a cross-party consensus in parliament that includes many within the Conservative party, even if not its leadership, and by reviving the plan, Starmer would signal his bold intentions to the red wall. Labour has to show it understands the drastic need for change in the country, and only then will it prove it is ready for government.
Justine Greening was the Conservative MP for Putney from 2005 to 2019
