On a fast train to nowhere: Rishi Sunak’s visionless party conference

Ever since The Independent broke the story two-and-a-half weeks ago that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt were in talks about cancelling the high-speed rail link to Manchester, the Conservative Party’s choice of Manchester as the venue for its annual conference has been a slow-motion disaster.

Now that ministers, party bigwigs, representatives and journalists have arrived – not even by low-speed rail, whose workers are on strike – the scale of the damage to the party’s reputation is unfolding.

Theresa May became this weekend the fourth of Mr Sunak’s Conservative predecessors to criticise him. She said that HS2 should be completed to provide more capacity on the West Coast Main Line, and she disagreed with the plan to end the line at Old Oak Common, six miles out of Euston, “because my constituents will be disadvantaged”.

She adds her voice to those of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, who both expended considerable political capital to keep the project going when they were in No 10. With Liz Truss returning to the fray at a fringe meeting and launching a pre-emptive strike with other Conservative MPs against possible tax rises, Mr Sunak is in the unprecedented position of being disowned by all recent prime ministers of his own party. For a man obsessed with numbers, four against one is not a good position to be in.

There are more unwelcome numbers for him in Professor Sir John Curtice’s opinion polling, which we report exclusively. Mr Sunak’s “personal popularity has largely disappeared, leaving him barely any more popular than his party”, says Prof Curtice, and his party is in a position “little better” than 12 months ago when Ms Truss’s short-lived administration collapsed.

Prof Curtice’s findings include a list of the Conservative Party’s failings, as seen by the voters, which is “rather longer than the list of perceived achievements”. The NHS, cost of living, the economy, immigration and “lockdown parties” are all on the negative side of the ledger, while early access to Covid vaccines and gay marriage were the only items on the positive list selected by more than one in 10 respondents – apart from Brexit, which appeared in both the negative and positive lists.

This is a terrible backdrop to a party conference intended to convey an image of Mr Sunak as the details-focused technocrat who is going to solve the nation’s problems with his “pragmatic and proportionate” approach. Some of what the prime minister intends to use his conference platform to say is sensible. He is right to keep a wary eye on the costs of big infrastructure projects and to insist on realism in the drive towards net zero. He is right to resist the frankly laughable attempt by Ms Truss to pretend that she was justified in borrowing money to cut taxes, mostly for the better-off.

But HS2 is a sound plan that will make a significant economic contribution over time; it should be stripped of unnecessary trimmings, but it should be proceeded with in full. The metaphor of axing a high-speed rail line to the great British city where Mr Sunak is holding his party conference is damning.

And his attempt to play politics with the climate crisis is unworthy. Now the prime minister is descending to the merely tawdry. Conjuring up an imaginary “war on the motorist” feels like a throwback to the Seventies – at a time when this country is on the verge of an electric-car revolution that will transform the environmental debate. It has come to something when central government thinks it can tell local authorities where 20mph speed limits should be.

All Mr Sunak has done with his “pragmatic” approach to HS2 and to net zero is to create more uncertainty for business, and to undermine his own credibility as someone who can deliver ambitious promises.