UK Conservative Party Leader Sunak Attempts to Resurrect the Party at Annual Meeting

The Conservative Party of the UK will hold its annual conference starting on Sunday in an effort to spark a comeback before a general election that is anticipated for next year and which it is presently on course to lose. The four-day conference in Manchester, northwest England, will be Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s first since he became Tory leader last October, and possibly the last before the election.

His party has been in power since 2010 and seems more besieged amid broad economic troubles, which originally kicked in under Sunak’s much-maligned predecessors Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. The major Labour opposition, whose annual conference gets underway in Liverpool on Sunday, has double-digit poll leads and is becoming more and more ready to resume ruling.

Sunak — who must conduct an election by January 2025 at the latest — will aim to use the conference to reinvigorate his ailing Tories and lay forth a larger, ostensibly more populist, policy program. “This week offers us a chance to set out our values to the British people, to commit ourselves to the cause and prepare for the election next year,” he said in a statement of welcome to delegates.

“The stakes in the general election next year have never been higher,” Sunak said, adding voters would have a choice between “two different ways of doing politics” and committing to rule “in the long-term interests of the country”.

Eyes on the fringe

At 2:00 p.m. (1300 GMT) on Sunday, party chairman Greg Hands will address the crowd on the main stage to open the festivities. Grant Shapps, who was just named defense secretary, and James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, will both deliver addresses in the afternoon. They have just returned from a weeklong trip to Ukraine.

Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt will be one of the featured speakers on Monday, while hardline Interior Minister Suella Braverman will be the main speaker on Tuesday. The conference will come to an end with a speech by Sunak on Wednesday at noon. Ministers, prominent Tories, activists, pundits, and others will participate in a variety of fringe activities.

Included among them is the former prime minister Liz Truss, whose one conference as the head of the Conservative Party last year was overshadowed by the terrible mini-budget she published less than two weeks before. It shook the financial markets, and its effects are still being felt across the economy and in surveys asking people how much they trust the Conservatives to handle the situation.

Largely unrepentant, Truss will hold a “Great British Growth Rally” Monday, supporting her disastrous tax-slashing program with several other former ministers. Amid widespread Tory dismay over high post-WWII tax levels, dozens of senior MPs — including Truss — disclosed late Friday they had signed a vow not to vote for Hunt’s November mini-budget if it includes any rates hikes.

Boris Johnson, a prominent member of the party, is not on the scheduled conference agenda. He resigned as a Conservative MP in June before being expelled by parliamentarians after being ejected from Downing Street a little more than a year earlier as a result of many scandals. They had discovered that he purposefully deceived them during the “Partygate” controversy.

: “CHANGES”

In spite of the biggest cost-of-living crises in a generation and, until recently, decades-high double-digit inflation, Sunak has spent the most of his first year in command attempting to stabilize Britain’s crisis-hit economic condition.

But after consistently falling well behind Labour in surveys, he has changed tactics in recent weeks in an apparent effort to set his party apart from its competitor. A rush of pronouncements and leaks have been made about everything from infrastructure funding to road and climate change regulations.

In response to an increasing number of local government limitations on automobiles and where they may be driven in the name of environmental preservation, he outlined plans to “support drivers” and fight back against “anti-car measures” on Friday. It comes after last week’s contentious announcement to loosen environmental regulations aimed at attaining net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In addition, the UK prime minister is apparently prepared to scrap a pricey new high-speed rail link between Birmingham and Manchester. Other policy changes to inheritance tax and education have also been suggested.

“I’ve been working here for about a year… I took the time to dig beneath the bonnet,” Sunak said in an interview with the tabloid The Sun that was made public on Saturday. Now that I am in a position, I want to outline the improvements I want to bring to our nation.