The Conservative conference is already a disaster for Rishi Sunak

The prime minister won’t be able to turn things around in Manchester – he has to hope for the economy to rescue him next year, writes John Rentoul

Things can only get worse for Sunak for the next few weeks (PA)

Everything will go wrong. Sometimes in politics when things start to go wrong, they keep going wrong. Rishi Sunak’s speech on Wednesday could be the greatest in party conference history, and it still couldn’t turn the tide.

If you are talking about cutting the high-speed rail link to Manchester and the discussion leaks just before you hold a conference in Manchester, it will tend to cast a pall on the proceedings. If a party is 17 points behind in the opinion polls on the eve of what is probably its last annual conference before an election, this will add to the gloom.

If Liz Truss is doing a fringe meeting to tell aggrieved Conservative members that they were right all along, it won’t help. If Boris Johnson feels under pressure to justify his fee for an expensive column in the Daily Mail by elaborating his conspiracy theory about how he was ousted, likewise. If journalists speculate about the contest to be leader of the opposition after a likely election defeat, that will do little to lift the mood.

“Other measures will be laid before you,” as the King says at the end of his speech to open a new session of parliament. Each secretary of state will come to Manchester wanting to announce a headline policy in their conference speech. The prime minister will want several for his. None of them will do the Conservatives any good. On the contrary, most of them will be leaked to journalists and shredded by them before they are even delivered – derided as re-announcements, gimmicks, or just plain bad ideas.

Even if Sunak’s oratory was an immediate entry in the next edition of The Penguin Book of Modern Political Speeches, it wouldn’t be able to reverse that self-reinforcing cycle of Tory splittery and pessimism. Most great conference speeches didn’t have immediate effects. “U-turn if you want to.” “Hiring taxis to scuttle around a city.” “No time for a novice.” Only Margaret Thatcher went on to win an election, and she had time to fight a war in the Falklands and have the economy recover strongly, while the opposition party split.

What Sunak should have done was keep the second phase of HS2 to Manchester and cancel the party conference instead. As it is, he will just have to endure it. Then he will have the insult added to injury of having to watch the Labour conference in Liverpool, enjoying the mirror image of his misery. Keir Starmer has no answers to the nation’s problems, but everything he and his party say will be reported through the prism of not being responsible for anything that has gone wrong for the past 13 years, and the prospect of a change of government, which is always interesting – and therefore more newsworthy than the alternative.

So everything will keep getting worse for Sunak, and better for Starmer – until there is a correction. There will always be a correction. The most trivial reason is that journalists will get bored. There will come a point when it will be more interesting to report the opposite of what we are reporting now. Sunak, the comeback kid. The unexpected Tory revival. The big thing that people should have seen coming but did not.

But there are more fundamental possible causes of a change of mood. The economy is the main one. Real incomes are expected to rise next year. If growth is higher than expected and people feel it, it could make a difference. The downside is that mortgages will still be higher (they were always going to be – it has nothing to do with Truss any more, but voters will blame her anyway). Even so, if Sunak stuffs the doctors’ mouths with gold and finally starts to make progress on NHS waiting lists, it may become possible for a different story to be heard.

Hence the significance of Sunak’s new “pragmatism” on climate change. It is just possible to see how, if the next election becomes a choice about the future rather than simply a verdict on years of Tory turmoil, the voters might see Labour’s green enthusiasm as a threat.

Sunak’s postponement of the date for banning the sale of petrol-only cars might make only a small difference in practice – 80 per cent of new cars sold in 2030 will be electric or hybrids rather than 100 per cent – but the change of tone is a big deal. It allows the Tories to align with public opinion, which supports net zero but does not want to bear any costs.

It is possible to imagine an election campaign in which Labour is painted as the party of anti-car, London-based utopians, while the Tories promise to protect people from the cost of well-intentioned but impractical schemes.

Things can only get worse for Sunak for the next few weeks, but eventually, there will be a correction. It may be too little and too late to save him at the election, but perhaps he needs “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke as his campaign theme.