Ch-ch-ch-changes! Sunak kills off HS2, A-levels and smoking – and sets fire to his future

Akshata Murty was charming and looked a million dollars, Barbie to Rishi’s dead-eyed Ken, writes Tom Peck. Unfortunately, all her husband had to trumpet was empty rhetoric and a fantasy world in which everything changes, and yet stays exactly the same

Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty, who ‘looked a million dollars – just don’t ask where they’re domiciled’ (PA Wire)

“Be in no doubt. It is time for a change – and we are it!” After four wild days in Manchester, these were the last triumphant words of the Conservatives’ 14th consecutive conference as the party of government.

The delegates clapped their hands in front of them as their eyes glanced sidewards. There’s no doubt it is time for a change. But are they it? Even the prime minister didn’t look entirely convinced.

It’s possible that the auto-satirical madness of the moment had caught up with him. There he had been, not 10 minutes beforehand, standing in a disused Manchester railway station, proudly announcing the cancellation of a major new train line to Manchester. He had looked change square in the eye and given it the finger, and – we must assume – hoped that nobody had noticed.

The moment had all the stock trappings of grand theatre which everyone’s seen before. The bright blue billboards, the curving screens, and “Long-Term Decisions For A Brighter Future”, the latest variation on the same old theme. The slogan was 8ft high on six different screens, and here he was, taking very short-term decisions for maximum short-term pressure, as he comes, barring a miracle, to the end of a very short term of his own.

One bit took us all by surprise. After the two warm-up acts, a fully mad Penny Mordaunt and a surprisingly charming Johnny Mercer, there was a change to the scheduled programming. Out strode Mrs Sunak, Akshata Murty. She seemed rather nice. She seemed kind, she was charming. She looked a million dollars – just don’t ask where they’re domiciled.

“Rishi and I are each other’s best friends,” she said. In the row behind me, someone shed an actual tear – and these were the press seats.

“Aspiration,” she said, “runs through his DNA.” It was his parents’ aspiration that took him to Winchester College, and his own aspiration that took him to Goldman Sachs, leaving shortly before the synthetic collaterised debt obligations that firm invented became central to the 2008 financial crisis which killed off the very idea of aspiration for an entire generation.

But what she most loved about him, she said, was “his honesty, his integrity, and a firm understanding of right from wrong”. So she must be as mystified as anyone as to quite how he’s come to be leading a party that has spent four full days being patiently called out for demonising migrants and just making up absolute rubbish.

But it didn’t seem to be sufficient to have dimmed their love for one another, as they shared a little kiss behind the lectern. It was a very sweet moment. Was she his lucky charm? Barbie (in a fitting, pastel peach-pink) to his Ken? The last prime minister to ask their spouse to introduce them was Gordon Brown in 2009. The crowd loved her, too.

She was, he said, “the best long-term decision for a brighter future I ever made”. A decent gag, and also, one suspects, a common sentiment among the sons-in-law of billionaires.

Under the lights and in front of the backdrop, he tried his best to paint a picture of a man of change. Did he look different than before? He still carries the countenance of the head boy who never grew up. A Forrest Gump type, almost. A man who has conquered the world through the power of politeness alone, albeit with the assistance of significant private wealth and the good fortune of a truly spectacular list of other people’s mistakes.

Is he now, somehow, turning a corner? There’s a flash of grey at the ears these days, a little downward curl at the corner of the lips. A sign, perhaps, that those piano teeth might be bared a little more in anger than they ever used to. That there’s always a touch of frustration simmering under the surface that never used to be there.

His little drumroll video, his entrance music spoke of change. Change, change, change. Beneath the usual montage footage, a scouse voice praised him for having  “changed” the Northern Ireland Protocol, which is not exactly change, it’s damage limitation.

“Change,” it said, was “a new approach to net zero”. Which even he would have to admit was not change at all, it was a reversal of change. Rishi’s brand of change is the change to make sure everything stays the same. It’s a hard sell, and he made hard work of it.

When it came to the big moment, he paused, took a deep breath and just came out with it: “I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project.”

The business case for it, Sunak reckons, no longer exists. The money should be spent elsewhere, specifically on some new plan of his called “Network North”, that involves new bits of train track, new stations, new road.

“Sheffield in 42 minutes! Hull in 84 minutes! The A2! The A5! The M6!” They clapped so loud at that, that it may have been a deliberate attempt to drown out all of the many voices patiently pointing out that the North doesn’t want “Network North”, it wants the change they were promised, before Mr Change turned up and scrapped it all.

They’ve had enough of both decline and chaos. And therein lies the most vexatious problem of all. The country has had enough both of change and of everything being the same. They’ve had enough of 13 years of Tories, but also had enough of having had three prime ministers give this set speech in the last three years.

His other big ideas were an overhaul of the education system that won’t happen and a ratchet-style ever-increasing age limit for smoking. A noble cause, but smoking is kind of dying out already. No one at weddings smokes anymore. It’s purely anecdotal, but the only place I ever see anyone smoking from one year to the next is at party conferences. One of the MPs I saw clapping the news I also saw having a 9am burn outside the Midland Hotel. Not exactly hypocritical, you could argue, but quite amusing.

He also contributed his fair share of what has been a theme of the conference. Not exactly out and out lies or conspiracy theories, though we’ve seen plenty of them. They were merely things that no one believes.

“We Conservatives love the natural world, we are determined to be good stewards of it.” This summer, there were families on the news who were sweltering on Devon beaches but couldn’t go in the sea because it was filled with s***.

“I’m confident that once the flights to Rwanda start, the crossings will stop.” The flights to Rwanda are illegal. They’re not going to start, and the crossings won’t stop anyway.

“A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense!” They whooped and cheered for that one, but what does it mean? You can’t traverse the intense political difficulties of the trans rights debate through a sweeping one-sentence statement which means absolutely nothing more than trans people simply don’t exist. No one believes that.

The most moving part of the speech was when he spoke of his family and his Asian heritage. There was, one has to admit, a touch of water in your sketchwriter’s eyes when Sunak spoke of his grandfather, standing in Westminster Hall and getting out his mobile phone to call the landlady that put him up when he first came to England, to tell her that his grandson was an MP.

“My story is a British story. A story about how a family can go from arriving here with little to Downing Street in three generations,” he said. It’s stirring stuff – but the question is whether his story is now dead, and whose fault that is.

Sunak’s parents had normal lives, normal jobs, and they sacrificed everything to send their son to Winchester College, from where the sky has been the limit. But Sunak’s story is the story of the Eighties and the Nineties. Things don’t work like that now. It’s a dream that’s died on his party’s watch, and the voters are going to do something about it.

Sunak did his very best. His wife was very nice. But the country is not crying out for Rishi’s unique brand of change, in which everything stays the same. He is the change that no one wants or needs, and he looks like a man who already knows it.