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.
