This is the guardian.Today he says he’ll be the man to change Britain.So, did Rishi Sunak deliver?The public never got a chance to votefor Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister before heend to Downing Street a year ago.But on Wednesday, he laid the foundations forwhat he hopes is a strategy to winthe election that everyone is expecting next year.Today, I will set out how we willachieve this, beginning with a set of longterm decisions to build a brighter future forour children and to fundamentally change our country.I’m not on the agenda for today.A bit of a surprise addition, shall we say.Akshata Murthy, Sunak’s billionaire wife, introducedher husband as fun loving, asa man who believed in aspiration.As someone who had to tell hard truths, please knowthat Rishi is working hard to do the right thingfor the country, not just for now, but for thelong term, with honesty and with integrity.Sinak was determined to sell us something different, somethingnew from what he called the politics of old.We’ve had 30 years of a political systemwhich incentivizes the easy decision, not the right.130 years of vested interest standingin the way of change.30 years of rhetorical ambition which achieveslittle more than a short term headline.But did it all add up?And are the public and his party buying it?From the guardian.I’m Nasheen Iqbal.Today in focus, Rishi Sunak’s firstconference speech as Conservative Party leader.Will it be his last?Kieran Stacey, you’re The Guardian’s political correspondent andyou’ve been in Manchester all week at theConservative Party conference, which from the outside hasseemed a pretty chaotic affair.Now, when Rishi Sinak got up to make his first conferencespeech as party leader, what was he setting out to doand how much did he want to make it about himself?He definitely did want to make it about himself.Now, my mother set up her own pharmacy.It was a proper family business.We all chipped in.As a teenager, I helped deliverprescriptions and do the books.I learnt there the importance of being able tomeet your commitments and make good on your promises.I think one of the things that he has decidedis that he’s the best asset that Conservatives have rightnow, and the polling suggests that is largely true.He is more popular than the party itself.He’s obviously more popular thaneither of his two predecessors.But the thing that he was really trying todo is introduce himself as the change candidate.That was one of the mostcommon words in the entire speech.I will lead in a different way because that is theonly way to create the sort of change in our politicsand in our country that we all desperately want to see.His team has decided that they only win thiselection if they do so on a change platform.It’s incredibly hard to do thatafter 13 years of Conservative government.And so the end result was hisspeech was absolutely chock full of contradictions.Well, we’ll come back to those contradictions in amoment, but let’s talk about the conference, because despitesome headline grabbing speeches, it was pretty policy lightuntil Rishi Sunak took to the stage.What did he announce policy wise?There were three major announcements.One we’ve been talking about for the last 48 hours,if not two weeks now, which was obviously the cancellationof HS Two, the northern leg of HS Two.It will now no longer be ahigh speed train north of Birmingham.I am ending this long running saga.I am canceling the rest of the HS Two project.And in its place and in itsplace, we will reinvest every single penny.36 billion pounds, the Prime Minister said, willgo to other transport projects in the north.So that’s number one.Number two was essentially a ban on smoking.Now, if we could break that cycle, if wecould stop the start, then we would be onour way to ending the biggest cause of preventabledeath and disease in our country.The Guardian actually revealed this a coupleof weeks ago, so for Guardian readers,it wouldn’t have been a surprise.But I think for many people in thehall, it was a bit of a surprise.It’s not the kind of thing Conservative Prime Ministersoften do, but it is quite a bold policy.It’s copying the New Zealand model of making thelegal age at which you can smoke one yearhigher every year, so that essentially, in a fewdecades time, no one will be allowed to smoke.So that was really interesting bit of policy.Number three is sweeping changes to the educationsystem, specifically to A levels, to make mathsin English compulsory up to 18 and movetowards a kind of more International Baccalaureate styleof examination for 18 year olds.We will introduce the new, rigorous, knowledge, rich,advanced British standard, which will bring together Alevels and T levels into a new singlequalification for our school leavers.Again, quite an interesting policy, and Ithink one will be looking into morecarefully over the next few days.The difficult thing was makingthose three things tie together.So Rishi Sunak would tell us, well, all of thesethings are very difficult decisions to make and show thatI’ve got the long term future of the country atheart and I’m willing to make decisions others haven’t.But actually, there’s no real pattern to them.And one of them, of course, was leaked weeks inadvance and listeners can go back and listen to thetoday and focus about the HS Two announcement.But, Kieran, what exactly didSunak promise in its place?I mean, the words network north seemed tobe used for the first time today.Sounded very exciting.But what was in that plan?Well, we don’t exactly know.We know some of the things that he mentioned,including upgrades to Rose up north, faster east westtransport links you will be able to get fromManchester to the new station in Bradford in 30minutes, sheffield in 42 minutes, and to Hull in84 minutes on a fully electrified line.We’re trying to figure out now howmuch of these are new plans.Obviously, we’d heard of northern powerhouse rail before, whichwas the great plan to have a high speedlink going all the way from Liverpool to Hull,but that actually relied on some of the infrastructurefrom HS Two to be in place.So I suspect even the government doesn’t quite knowhow it’s going to do all of these things.There is a lot of money there.There’s 36 billion pounds, the Prime Minister says, so there’sa lot of pet projects they can spend it on.We’ll build the Midlands railhub connecting 50 different stations.We’ll help Andy Street extend the West Midlands metro.We’ll build the Leeds tram.We’ll electrify the North Wales mainline.Upgrade the A one, the A two, the A five, the M six.But at the moment, we’re still trying to figureout how many of those things are actually newand how many of these things are just extramoney for things that have already been announced.And the news that HS Two is canceled, or at leastthe leg from Birmingham to Manchester, is it a sign thatthe party is giving up on those previously labor health seatsin the north of England, the so called Red Wall?Obviously, they would say no.And actually, I don’t think it is a sign of that.I think what it’s a sign of is a veryRishi Sunak thing, which is he’s gone through the numbers,he’s examined every bit of this in detail and he’sjust decided that it doesn’t make financial sense to keepfunding this program, which is getting more and more expensive.HS Two is the ultimate example of the old consensus.The result is a project whose costs havemore than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed,and it is not scheduled to reach herein Manchester for almost two decades.I think he’s hoping that the fact that he’s reinvestingall this money into other projects in the north willshow that he’s still committed to the north.The problem is, HS Two has becomeemblematic of conservative support for the north.So even if people like what’s going to replace it,just the sheer fact of canceling HS Two to Manchester,especially if a lot of the regional mayors now comeout and say, you’re abandoning us, I think the opticsof it could be very bad indeed.He did also decide to make this somewhat a personalspeech and there was a decision to have his wifeintroduce him and talk about his personal values.And of course, Rishi Sunak talked about his ownfamily values, and that being central to his beliefs.One of the most interesting parts of this speech waswhen he started talking about his parents and what beingthe son of an immigrant means to him.And he had this one particular passage.Now, obviously, this is taken from a Conservativecampaign poster back in the late 70s, early80s, where he said, what does the ToryParty offer to a family of immigrants?The chance to become Energy Secretary, BusinessSecretary, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, even thechance to to become Prime Minister.The tone of that was so markedly differentfrom what Suella Braverman said just a dayor two ago when she talked. “  WWW.ARMINIC.COM  “  About a hurricane coming because of migration.The wind of change that carried my own parentsacross the globe in the 20th century was amere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming.It was almost like she was framing herown family story of migration as a negativething, whereas Rishi Sunak tried to completely theopposite and frame it as a positive thing.And he did say, I amBritain’s first Asian Prime Minister.And I’m proud of that.And then he said, But I’m proud ofthe fact that it’s no big deal.Maybe it’s no big deal and maybe this is partlybecause my own background as a British Asian, but Iwould really like to hear him speak more about that,because I think it is one thing that he hasreally going for him that is different from his predecessors,that is different from so many people who’ve come before.And I think if he starts to tell thatstory about why he, as a British Asian isa Conservative, then it will be much more compellingthan trying to position himself as a change candidatewhen his party’s been in power for 13 years.I mean, of course we sayall that, but he wasn’t elected.He is a British Asian PrimeMinister by default in some respects.Kieran there were some loud cheers in theroom when Sunak talked about parents should havethe right to know what their kids arebeing taught about relationships in school.He talked about common sense values.How did it play out in the room?Oh, incredibly well.I mean, I think one of the biggest cheers was he said somethinglike, a man is a man and a woman is a woman.That’s just common sense.I mean, that stuff goes down very well among theTory faithful and we shouldn’t get bullied into believing thatpeople can be any sex they want to be. They can’t.A man is a man and a woman is a woman.That’s just common sense.I don’t know how strongly he feels abouttrans issues and identity issues might be wrong.I suspect he doesn’t feel particularly strongly at all.It sounds strong, I don’t know.It was a feature of his leadership campaign,but he says it in a way thatsuggests he’s not really that bothered.I don’t personally believe that heis a great cultural warrior.I don’t think he feels massively strongly about transissues, but pretty much every single Conservative Minister who’sspoken this week has touched on that. At one point.It’s just a crowd pleaser.So he had education, smoking, newrail, infrastructure project, some cultural stuff.Was there anything that linked all of this together,given what you’ve said about his overall strategy?No, nothing linked all this stuff together.That’s the problem for him.I think he’s right to have decided that thenext election is going to be a change electionand that if he’s going to win it.He needs to position himself as the change candidate.What he then wants to do is set up a seriesof issues on which he and the British people are onone side and the Westminster establishment is on the other side.Today we have made three huge decisionsto change the direction of our country.We will give Britain the infrastructure it needs, protectthe long term future of our NHS and cutcancer deaths by a quarter and create the besteducation system in the Western world to set upour children for the opportunities of the future.The problem is, on the four things thathe’s announced over the last few weeks, noneof them quite fit that bill.There’s no great Westminster establishment that’s in favor of smokingand is standing in his way on that one.On education, these reforms are perfectly sensible thingsthat can be debated by policy experts.But again, there’s no particular group of peoplewho say, no, you can’t do that.On HS two, obviously there is a big group ofpeople who think that the Prime Minister shouldn’t do thatand a lot of them are in Westminster and havebeen Prime Minister over the last few years.But it’s not clear yet whether the British peopleare on his side of that debate or not.And on net zero, similarly, I would say theWestminster Consensus has been in favor of things likethe 2030 phase out for petrol and diesel cars,which he changed a few weeks ago.But again, are the public on his side?That one’s just a little more difficult totell, so he’s not quite found the issue.I think that resonates with whathe’s trying to bill himself as.One issue that does actually, is immigration, where the kindof Westminster Consensus, if you want to be as bluntas that, is that the Rwanda plan won’t work, isprobably illegal and possibly won’t even come in.Now, Rishi Sinak obviously doesn’t think that, so itwasn’t a surprise to me that we heard alot about immigration during the speech, but actually therewas nothing particularly new in that.And the problem he has, of course, on that particularissue is that we currently have record levels of netmigration into the UK and we’ve had 13 years ofa Conservative government, so it’s just difficult for him toreally campaign that hard on that issue.But as you said, he has put himself forwardand set out his stall as a candidate ofchange and part of that is trying to differentiatehimself from Kirstarmer and completely attacking the opposition.How did he go about that today?What did he have to say?Well, it’s interesting you say that that isabout differentiating himself from Kirstarmer because actually Kirstarmersays almost exactly the same thing.Kirstarmer constantly talks about how the WestminsterConsensus is broken and how he isthe man to take long term decisions.They are both going to go into the nextelection saying almost the same thing as each other,which is potentially a problem for Rishi Sunak, becauseKirstarmer has a greater claim to be a changecandidate than Rishi Sunak does.But some of the Conservative attacks on Kirstama doresonate and they are things that the Labour leaderis going to have to deal with.The main one is flip flopping, but the worstthing about Sakir is that he just says whateverhe thinks will benefit him the most.Doesn’t matter whether he can deliver, it doesn’t matter ifit’s true, it doesn’t matter if he said the oppositejust a few weeks or months ago, the Tory chairman,Greg Hans, has been walking around Tory conference with apair of flip flops in his hand, handing them outto people as he goes.We had several times people saying that Keir Starmer willsay anything and do anything to get into power.The one attack that I think really resonated was pointing outthat he used to be an ally of Jeremy Corbyn andhas then taken on the left of the party.Who knows what he really stands for?Sakir Starmer might want us to forget about hisrepeated support for Jeremy Corbyn, but we never will.That stuff is potent, and mostlybecause there’s some truth in it.And that is an attack that Kirstama is goingto have to really tackle head on, I think,in his conference speech in a few days’time.What kind of Tory party is Rishi Sunaknow leading and is it behind him?Well, Kieran, this conference wasn’t all aboutRishi Sunak and his very long speech.There was also an opportunity for Cabinetministers and prominent Tories to have theirsay and address the members.Some of it has been pretty wild.Can you tell me exactly what has been said?This week we had Susan Hall, the Torycandidate for London mayor, accusing Sadiq Khan, theLabour London mayor, of somehow being some kindof a threat to London’s Jews.So I will ask for as much help asI can get in London because we need todefeat him, particularly for our Jewish community.So thank you for your support.At times, this conference has takenon quite a dark tone.The most bleak speech was probably SuellaBravman’s and she used language that wasvery, very hardline in its tone.Mark Harper, who is the Transport Secretary, who is regardedin the Tory Party as a Moderate, has been goingout talking about 15 minutes city conspiracy theories.Now, for those listeners who don’t know what a 15 minutescity is, it started out as the idea that you should. “  WWW.ARMINIC.COM  “  Live within 15 minutes walkingdistance of local amenities.Perfectly sensible and has somehow morphed in theConservative mind to become local councils are goingto force you to only travel 15 minutes.What is sinister and what we shouldn’t tolerate is theidea that local councils can decide how often you goto the shops and that they ration who uses theroads and when, and they police it all with CCTV.But it’s not just Harper, is it?Sunak’s repeated those lines as well andthey’re pretty far right narrative adjacent. Yeah.I mean, they must think that there iselectoral capital in repeating some of these claims.It feels a little bit like desperation.They must be getting some resonance, but Iwould imagine they’re getting resonance among a veryspecific group of people and not among abroad spectrum of the electorate.What does it say about the Conservative Party of2023 and the direction of travel it’s taking?Because we’ve heard that Sunak, for instance, isopen to allowing Nigel Farage to rejoin it.Do we have to get used to the ideaof this being a much harder right party now?Well, let’s see what happens if the Conservatives losethe next election and there’s a leadership election.I think that’s going to determine a lotof the next few years of Conservative politics.If someone like Suella Bravman, perhaps KemmyBadenok, wins that election, that will takethe party in one direction.If Penny Mordent does, or perhaps James Cleverly,that might take it in a different direction.There was an interesting piece written by SamCoates, who’s Sky News’s deputy political editor, wherehe pointed out the similarity between what isgoing on today in the Conservative Party andwhat happened in the Labour Party just beforeJeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.And it is something wein political circles called entryism.It is the idea that a far right or farleft faction decides to seek membership of a mainstream partyin order to change the direction of that party.And that is essentially what seems to be going on withNigel Faraj and his supporters over the last few days.As you say, we’ve heard the Prime Minister sayhe’d be open to Faraj rejoining the party.This is a man who’s campaigned against theTories for election after election after election.It is obviously surprising that we are hereat a Tory Party conference with the PrimeMinister and we’re all talking about Nigel Faraj.Even more surprising to me was thathe was let in the first place.How on earth did they let somebody who is nota member of the party, who campaigns vociferously against them,become the star of the show for the last week?Okay, so Rishi Sudak has presentedhimself as a change candidate.How successful do you thinkhe was in yesterday’s speech?In certain ways, Rishi Sunakreally is a change candidate.He’s certainly a change from thelast two conservative Prime Ministers.He’s a change in that I think he brings asense of calm to the job that has been missingfor a long time, brings an attention to detail that’sbeen missing for a long time, brings a seriousness anda work ethic that’s been missing from that job.But none of his policies really matchup with his narrative of change.They’re kind of a scattergun of various different, oftenquite short termist policy changes that he hopes willjust get him through the next twelve months.For Rishi Sunak to be a change candidate,I would like to see him do twothings which he seems unwilling to do.Number one, he needs to take onLiz Truss and Boris Johnson head on.He can’t keep hinting, oh, I’ma bit different from those guys.He actually needs to show it and heneeds to say something about his two predecessors.Now, I appreciate that he didn’t win the Conservative Partyleadership ahead of Liz Truss when it was properly contestedand he feels hampered by that, but at the sametime he’s in the position now, he’s trying to takethe party in a certain direction.He actually needs to stand upagainst his two former predecessors.Otherwise we’re going to keep seeing the sight that wesaw this week of Liz Truss being the main drawof the Conservative Party Conference twelve months after she trashedthe economy and was ejected from office.So that’s number one.Number two is that he is the child of immigrantsand he is the first British Asian Prime Minister.I think it defines him in ways that people don’tunderstand and in ways that he doesn’t like to talkabout, but it does define him and he should talkabout it and he should explain what it means tohim as Prime Minister and why it makes him differentfrom those who’ve gone before.So from everything you’ve seen, Kieran, does it feel likeRishi Sunak is a man in control of his party?Rishi Sunak is a man justabout in control of his party.This party’s been through a lot in the lastfew years, especially with the two former Prime Ministers.There was a sense definitely over the lastfew days here in Manchester of relief.Listeners may remember the last Tory Party conferencewhere the government was essentially collapsing live infront of our eyes, where senior cabinet ministerswere going around telling any journalist they couldfind just how awful Liz Truss was whileshe was still Prime Minister.There was none of that here.Rishi Sunak has restored calm, he’srestored a sense of optimism.And they were a bit buoyed by a poll in theobserver which came out just on the eve of conference showingthat they had narrowed the gap significantly with Labour.Other polls have since suggested that might not be true.But there is a sense of cautious optimism,definitely a sense that things have got better,that Rishi Sunak is probably their last option.They don’t have any appetite, I think, foranother leadership change before next year, and thatis keeping him in control for now.But as we mentioned, what on earthwill happen if he loses the election?Will the floodgates open?Will the party swing wildly to the right?Or will the Conservative party regain its instinctfor winning elections and its instinct for headingto pretty much where the voters usually are?Kieran, thank you so much for talking to us.Thanks very much.That was the Guardian’spolitical correspondent, Kieran Stacey.You can follow The Guardian’s coverage of partyconference season as it happens on theguardian.com andthere’s just time to mention another Guardian podcast.Pop culture with Shantay Joseph is back.And last week, Shantay won gold in therising star category of the British Podcast Awards.This week, Shantay examines why artists likeBeyonce and Taylor Swift are transforming theirstadium tours into cinema experiences.And she speaks to R B singer Mahalia Find.That wherever you got this podcast.And that’s it for today.I’m Nishinik Ball and this episode was producedby Ned Carter Miles and Lucy Hoff.Sound design was by Rudy Zagadlo.The executive Producer was Phil Maynard.Thanks for listening.We’ll be back tomorrow.This is the guardian.