UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rallies his Conservatives by saying he's ready to take tough decisions
Rishi Sunak on Wednesday urged skeptical voters, and his own Conservative Party: Keep me in office and I'll offer you change. In his first — and possibly last — speech as leader to the party's annual conference before an election due in 2024, Sunak said he's not afraid to make tough choices and big decisions that will deliver «long-term success» rather than «short-term advantage».
But one of his big decisions has divided the party and threatens to derail his agenda: scrapping much of an ambitious but overbudget high-speed railway line that was planned to link London and Manchester.
Sunak said he was cancelling the rest of the embattled HS2 project because its costs have doubled and «the facts have changed».
«The economic case has massively been weakened by the changes to business travel post-COVID,» he said, arguing it would be an «abdication of leadership» to continue.
Some Conservatives said the decision was a bad move — and doing it at a conference in Manchester was disastrous.
Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands region, called it «an incredible political gaffe» that would leave the party's opponents saying «the Tories have come to Manchester to shaft the North».
The embattled High Speed 2 railway, once billed as Europe's largest infrastructure project, was meant to slash journey times and increase capacity between London, the central England city of Birmingham and the northern cities of Manchester and Leeds with 250 mph (400 kph) state-of-the-art trains.
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