Can Sunak really cast himself as the enemy of the status quo?

Rishi Sunak today revealed a new enemy that he’s defining himself against: ‘the 30-year status quo’. Why this period? Because it includes Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Boris. Sunak wants to lump them together as a melange that includes Starmer. This was the crux of his speech today: to cast himself as the candidate of change and Keir Starmer as the custodian of the ‘old consensus’. This is plausible and has lots more potential: after his net zero and HS2 announcements, today was the chance to follow-up.

In his speech, Sunak fleshed out his original thesis: that it’s time to think about trade-offs. Instead of banking the £36 billion of savings from HS2, it would be spent on a plethora of far more needed projects: a Shipley bypass, 70 road schemes, bringing back the Don Valley line, doing up the A2, A5, and M6.