Sunak is in a race against time to show what he stands for

Rishi has been prime minister for almost a year, but we still don’t know what he stands for,” said one senior Conservative MP who backed Rishi Sunak for the party leadership. “He cannot wait a moment longer to set out what ‘Sunakism’ is and what another five years of it would mean.”

That even Sunak’s supporters are getting impatient is a worrying sign as he prepares for his first Tory conference as party leader, starting on Sunday.

What’s interesting is that the prime minister’s inner circle does not dispute this diagnosis; they want the conference to provide booster rockets to the relaunch he began 10 days ago by ditching some net zero measures.

“I have made my decision: we are going to change,” Sunak said then.

The conference, with a slogan of “long-term decisions for a brighter future” might bring announcements on crime, education and public service reforms to draw new “dividing lines” with Labour. Crucially, Sunak will need to offer voters a sense of hope and better times ahead after the cost-of-living crisis.

The event is not the only building block in Sunak’s long campaign for next year’s general election – the autumn statement and King’s Speech in November and the Budget next March will be other elements – but it is an important one.

The PM’s goal is to be seen as the change-maker. His team knows that if Labour holds the trump card of “time for change” at the election, Keir Starmer will enter Downing Street. So the Tories must offer change too. However, talking about change doesn’t mean the voters will buy it. Many people have tuned out of the Tories, thinking they have had their chance, or out of politics as a whole (which worries Labour).

In 2019, the combination of a “Brexit election”, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson’s unique character – brilliant at campaigning, if hopeless at governing – masked the fact the Tories had already been in power for nine years. Sunak has the unenviable task of seeking an unprecedented fifth term.

“It’s going to be hard for Rishi to be the change candidate,” one former Tory minister told me. “After 13 years in power, there is a lot of baggage.”

Other Tory MPs worry privately that Sunak has waited too long to set out his stall, saying his current strategy might have worked if it had been launched as soon as he became PM. (Allies insist the unfavourable circumstances – not least providing stability after the chaos of the Truss and Johnson regimes – required a more patient approach).

Sunak’s allies hope the conference will showcase “bold Rishi” and that he will show a different side to the cautious technocrat happier diving into the weeds of a policy than making headline-grabbing announcements. We might even see “risky Rishi”, a PM willing to take risks to close Labour’s consistent 20-point lead in the opinion polls. Sunak has nothing to lose but his chains – and an election.

For all party leaders, the annual conference presents both opportunities and threats. It usually offers a platform for favourable media coverage and to dominate the political agenda without interruptions from their opponents. But danger lurks, too: the hothouse atmosphere, scores of fringe meetings and boozy receptions can easily allow party divisions to become the story, magnified by the pack of journalists present.

Sunak doesn’t need a crystal ball to work out what could go wrong at what is likely to be his party’s last annual conference before the election: he can read the book on Liz Truss’s disastrous event a year ago in Birmingham. The conference helped to destroy her premiership as her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng made a spectacular U-turn on his decision to scrap the top 45p rate of income tax. The party’s deep divisions were on open display.

The good news for Sunak is that he will likely avoid such huge public splits. His net-zero rethink, while worrying Tory MPs in the South who fear an advance by the Liberal Democrats, has reassured the noisy right-wing MPs who are the most likely troublemakers.

“Rishi has bought himself some space, but people will be looking for more of the same,” said one Tory MP. “We can’t have a steady-as-she-goes conference.”

The bad news is that the gathering will also allow his Tory critics and the media to raise awkward questions he is not yet ready to answer. At the top of the list is HS2. Some Tories despair at No 10’s mishandling of the issue since The Independent revealed the Birmingham to Manchester leg could be delayed or scrapped. It allowed the story to run all the way to a crucial Tory conference… in Manchester.

“It’s like something out of The Thick of It,“ said one Tory insider. “They should have announced it or killed it. Letting the speculation continue is the worst of all worlds.”

The dithering has hardly been a good advert for a leader promising to take the “tough decisions” his Tory and Labour predecessors have dodged and who is expected to use his closing speech to the conference next Wednesday to criticise the short-term decision making that has dogged previous governments.

Sunak will try to change the music by outlining measures to please car drivers, such as stopping councils from introducing new 20mph speed limits on main roads, while portraying Labour as anti-motorist. But that might not lift the HS2 cloud hanging over the conference.

The conference will provide a platform for critics who think Sunak’s recent change of tack does not go far enough. Allies of Johnson, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel, will join forces at a rally with the New Conservatives, MPs who entered the Commons in 2017 and 2019, to demand a shift to “true conservative values”.

Their familiar right-wing shopping list includes immediate tax cuts; leaving the European Convention on Human Rights; an anti-woke crusade, particularly in schools, and “greater protection for biological women”.

A wider group of Tories will join the call for tax cuts but ministers will likely only offer “jam tomorrow” because Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has ruled out tax cuts in his autumn statement, saying the battle against inflation must be won first.

While Johnson is expected to stay away from the Manchester event, Truss will show no such self-restraint. Britain’s unrepentant, shortest-serving PM will address a “Great British growth rally” on Monday, at which demands for tax cuts are bound to feature. Her aides point out she has attended every Tory conference since 1997 and say her speech will be her only remarks in Manchester. Sunak’s allies would have much preferred her to keep out; they want the conference to be dominated by the launch of “the real Rishi”, not “noises off” that will remind voters of the Tory failures and mistakes he is trying to put right.

Yet Truss’s ability to damage her successor is limited. Unlike Johnson, who haunted David Cameron and Theresa May as a king over the water at his packed conference fringe meetings, Truss’s time has come and gone – even if her ideas remain popular with many Tory grassroots members.

Johnson’s exit from parliament means there is no Tory plotting to oust Sunak before the election. However, the strong likelihood of a Tory defeat next year means that ambitious ministers such as Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch might be tempted to use the conference to boost their credentials with party members (who elect the leader after Tory MPs choose a shortlist of two). The nightmare scenario for Sunak is that the event becomes an unofficial beauty parade ahead of the leadership contest that would surely follow an election defeat.

While Downing Street will approve every word of ministers’ speeches from the platform, their responses to questions on the fringe or in media interviews can cause grief for the leadership. Braverman went off-script last year.

This time she is due to address only one fringe meeting. If she had made this week’s inflammatory speech at the Manchester conference rather than Washington, it would have been seen as a direct challenge to Sunak’s authority – even though No 10 had approved her words.

The language of other potential leadership candidates such as James Cleverly, Penny Mordaunt, Gillian Keegan, Grant Shapps and Tom Tugendhat will be watched closely. Although some of them might want to show a little ankle to their Tory audience, Sunak will likely avoid the nightmare scenario. Most potential runners will remain loyal.

The PM will hope his party as a whole rediscovers its “secret weapon” of unity for the election and takes the fight to Labour. We can expect plenty of attacks on Starmer’s stance on immigration, the EU, the economy, net zero and motorists.

Allies of Sunak dismiss the idea that he is resigned to losing the election and is pursuing a “core vote” strategy to limit the scale of the defeat, or that his goal now is to “do the right thing” for the country in his remaining time in office. “He is adamant that this can still be turned around,” said one adviser. Tory strategists insist Labour’s vote is soft and take comfort in the many “don’t knows” who have not been won over by Starmer. They are convinced Sunak can win a presidential contest against the Labour leader.

However, the public will vote for a party as well as a PM and Sunak’s personal ratings have been dragged down by the Tories’ tarnished brand. He desperately needs a new offer.

A key test in Manchester will be whether his long-awaited future agenda is a coherent long-term plan for the country rather than a personal wishlist of reheated leftovers from his leadership campaign against Truss. To leave room for lower taxes in next March’s Budget, Sunak will face the same fiscal constraints as Starmer, and so may have to opt for measures such as A-level reform that do not cost lots of money.

Somehow Sunak must throw off Starmer’s “inaction man” jibe by becoming Action Man. It will not be easy. Perhaps the mission he accepted was too difficult a rescue act for anyone to pull off. Despite the herculean effort his team puts into the conference, many voters might remain unmoved. So might the opinion polls.

But one thing will become clear in Manchester: Sunak will not go down without a fight.