2023-10-04 17:27:55
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester on October 4, 2023. HANNAH MCKAY / REUTERS
Rishi Sunak wanted to take advantage of the high mass of the British Conservative Party, the annual conference organized from Sunday October 1 to Wednesday October 4 in Manchester, to relaunch his mandate as Prime Minister and galvanize his troops before the 2024 general elections, while the Tories are at least 15 points behind Labor in the polls. But this crucial meeting turned out to be chaotic, dominated by the personal ambitions of his possible successors against a backdrop of the party’s drift to the right. And it is in this context that the Prime Minister announced the abandonment of an essential part of the HS2 high-speed train project, the main British infrastructure project.
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If the leader closed these few days in the north-west metropolis of England on Wednesday with a strong and proactive speech, the real stars of the conference were Liz Truss, the former prime minister with a disastrous mandate, Suella Braverman, its very radical interior minister, and… Nigel Farage, the founder and former member of the far-right Ukip party, who has made numerous appearances there and now no longer rules out joining the ranks of the Tories. “I will think about it if the party really becomes a Conservative Party”, he said on Tuesday at the BBC microphone.
The day before, Liz Truss had a full house. With astonishing confidence, the former Prime Minister with the shortest mandate in the country’s history advocated the same economic program as the one she had attempted during her time at Downing Street in 2022 and which had forced her to resign after triggering a financial storm: all-out tax cuts, and a simplistic call for “return to growth”, without regard for the tense situation of the country’s public finances. In the audience, Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg, eminent Brexiters, as well as Nigel Farage, were all smiles.
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Just like Liz Truss, other party figures are betting less on a hypothetical victory in 2024 than on taking power within the party once in opposition. Already considered the favorite to replace Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman has further radicalized her populist rhetoric in Manchester. In front of a packed amphitheater on Tuesday, the minister, daughter of immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius, who like nothing more than to shock the “right-thinking”qualified “hurricane” the coming wave of migration.
Openly climate-sceptical views
Strengthening her “antiwoke” side, she also denounced the character ” toxic ” of a supposed “gender ideology” and called for the UK to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights. The audience warmly applauded her. The only one to dare protest, Andrew Boff, a long-time Tory, member of the London City Council, who deplored comments “homophobic”was taken out of the room manu militari.
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