Rishi Sunak has spent Conservative party conference week claiming he wants to do politics differently. If only. In fact, yesterday’s speech – quite possibly the only one he will ever give to a Tory conference as leader – was politics as usual. A series of policy announcements delivered from on high, some expected and others not, framed by an attack on Labour, made it the sort of speech that Tory prime ministers make on such occasions. But it was delivered to an audience and a party that know he may not be around to implement any of them.
True, it was the best-constructed and best-delivered conference speech by a Conservative prime minister since David Cameron. That may not be saying very much, given that the competition consists of spluttering Theresa May, blustering Boris Johnson and a self-destroying Liz Truss. But at least it had a theme running right through it. The theme was an attempt to redefine the party of government for the past 13 years as the party of change. The problem is that this is a trick, and not a good one, and Sunak isn’t the leader to pull it off anyway. It was his cones hotline moment. The audience could have greeted his speech with a chant of “One more year! One more year!”
