Why won’t Jeremy Hunt talk about HS2?

Despite the excitement outside the Tory conference hall in Manchester about Rishi Sunak deciding he would indeed scrap the Manchester leg of HS2, Jeremy Hunt didn’t mention it in his speech. He talked about the need to reduce costs long-term and said that public spending needed to come down. But the contribution of the high speed rail line to that public spending bill wasn’t something he covered at all. So the mystery and leaks continue.

What Hunt did want to say, and very early on in his rather short speech, was that ‘the level of tax is too high’. This was the line he needed to offer to rebellious Tory MPs and members, many of whom had just mobbed Liz Truss at her own ‘rally’ on the conference fringe. He argued that the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others were ‘wrong’ when they claimed it was a ‘permanent shift’ to a high tax economy, and that ‘we need a more productive state, not a bigger state’.