Sunak unleashes reset of his premiership

The thing that stood out about the prime minister’s speech was he wasn’t unveiling a whole bunch of guaranteed crowd pleasers.

These are ideas that provoke and divide, including within the Conservative Party – let alone the wider country.

Take HS2. The Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street, who thinks Rishi Sunak has made a big mistake, told me he had contemplated ripping up his Tory party membership card because of all this.

The former Conservative prime minister David Cameron added that it was “wrong” and “throws away 15 years of cross-party consensus, sustained over six administrations, and will make it much harder to build consensus for any future long-term projects”.

Boris Johnson, another former leader, chimed in and said “I agree.” Ouch.

Then take banning smoking in England for the next generation.

For some, the very idea of banning things – the state stopping people doing things, particularly if others are allowed to – is deeply un-Conservative. The former prime minister Liz Truss has let it be known she will vote against the change.

So, opposition from three former Conservative prime ministers and a sitting Conservative mayor before you even get going.

What, then, is the strategy here?

The prime minister and his senior advisers got together over the summer and realised something had to change. They had steadied the ship of government but still looked set to lose the next election.

There was a feeling that circumstance had stood in the way of Mr Sunak being himself politically. The pandemic and then politics had intervened, but now there was space for change.

This, they claim, is Mr Sunak unleashed – the authentic him, grabbing politics by the scruff of the neck and forcing those who disagree to set out an alternative.

Portraying himself as the advocate of change is an audacious pitch, Mr Sunak being the fifth prime minister of a so-far 13-year run of Conservative government. Plus his diagnosis of a generation of political failure has raised eyebrows.

A former Conservative cabinet minister rang me and said “it’s a bit rich going round saying all your predecessors were crap when you haven’t even got a mandate”. Remember Mr Sunak didn’t even win the support of Conservative Party members, let alone the country.

There is also an obvious tension here: a prime minister talking about the long term, but with a general election in the short term.

And so there are big questions about believability.

Can a prime minister who announces the scrapping of a long term project be trusted to deliver other long term projects – albeit ones with shorter timeframes? And they won’t all be down to him anyway – as many will have a timescale that stretches beyond the next election.

A final observation. We have spent the last few days in Manchester, prior to the prime minister’s speech, being told no decision had been taken on HS2.

And yet, no sooner had Mr Sunak made his announcement, a video appeared on his social media accounts spelling out the detail of what he had just said.

But it had been recorded in… Downing Street. A place he’s been away from since Saturday. So – it appears – he had in fact decided beforehand all along.

Folk around the prime minister insist technically it was a cabinet decision, with the transport secretary (currently Mark Harper) the legal decision maker and sometimes stuff is filmed but not used if no decision is reached.

The cabinet did meet in Manchester, just before the prime minister’s speech. Was it really possible ministers wouldn’t sign it off at that point and a whole segment of the address would be binned with minutes to go?

I’ll leave it to you to judge if that is an explanation you buy.

From Manchester, the next stop: Liverpool, as the roadshow of party conference season trundles on, and we hear from the man hoping to replace Mr Sunak as prime minister – Sir Keir Starmer.

How will he respond to what he, and we, have heard in Manchester?

— Reports /TrainViral/