Rishi Sunak wanted to take advantage of the British Conservative Party's annual conference in Manchester from Sunday, October 1 to Wednesday, October 4 to strengthen his position as prime minister and rally his supporters in preparation for the 2024 general election. This comes as the Tories are currently trailing the Labour Party by a significant margin of at least 15 points in the polls. But this crucial date has proved chaotic, marked by the personal ambitions of his possible successors amid the party's drift to the right. It was against this backdrop that the Prime Minister announced the abandonment of an essential part of the HS2 high-speed rail project, Britain's cornerstone infrastructure project.
Although the leader closed his few days in the north-western English city with a long and assertive speech on Wednesday, the real stars of the conference were Liz Truss, the disastrous former Prime Minister, Suella Braverman, his radical Home Secretary, and Nigel Farage, founder and former member of the far-right Ukip party, who has made numerous appearances and is no longer ruling out rejoining the Tories. "If after the next election they [the Tories] reset and realign then I might," he told the BBC on Tuesday.
The day before, Liz Truss had played to a packed house. With staggering aplomb, the former prime minister, with the shortest mandate in the country's history, championed the same economic program that she had pursued during her time in Downing Street in 2022, and which had forced her to resign after triggering a financial storm: tax cuts across the board and a simplistic call for a "return to growth," with no regard for the country's strained public finances. In the audience, prominent Brexiters Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg were all smiles, seated beside Farage.
Like Truss, other party figures are betting less on a hypothetical victory in 2024 than on seizing power within the party once in opposition. Already considered the favorite to replace Sunak, Braverman further radicalized her populist rhetoric in Manchester. In front of a packed audience on Tuesday, the minister, daughter of immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius, who likes nothing more than to shock the "woke," spoke of a "hurricane of mass migration."
Flaunting her "anti-woke" side, she also denounced the "toxic" nature of a supposed "gender ideology" and called for the UK to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights. The audience gave her a warm round of applause. The only one to dare protest, Andrew Boff, a long-standing Tory and member of London's City Council, who deplored the "homophobic" remarks, was removed from the room by security.
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