This year’s Conservative Party conference has been widely described as a wake – and it is certainly full of ghosts. Theresa May has been decrying the watering down of measures to reach the UK’s ambitious net-zero targets (which her government passed into law). Liz Truss has led a rally in support of tax cuts and pro-growth reforms (which she attempted to implement during her short stint as PM). And the ghost of HS2 has been in Manchester since it was first rumoured the rail line would never get here. But one figure from the recent political past appears to have been resurrected and is stronger than ever: Nigel Farage. In the latest edition of the New Statesman we put Farage ...

There is an air of unreality in Manchester at the Conservative Party conference. It starts just as you walk through the front doors of the magnificent Central arena. Emblazoned on this former railway station is the slogan “Taking long-term decisions for a better future”. It feels – to put it mildly – discordant with events inside. The main talking point of the conference so far has been whether or not Sunak’s government will cut a long-term piece of infrastructure (HS2) for the short-term relief of more money to spend elsewhere. This discordance continues on the conference fringe. Those attracting sell-out crowds are not cabinet ministers, or the could-yet-bes, but the has-beens and down-and-outs. Chief among the latter group is Liz Truss. ...

As the Conservatives remain in Manchester for their conference, Rishi Sunak has reportedly resolved to shelve the northern leg of HS2 to Manchester. That would mean the line went only from London to Birmingham. Downing Street refused to deny that the Prime Minister would confirm the cancellation at a meeting of his cabinet. But government sources have also repeatedly stressed that no final decision has been made.  The scrapping of the line would be in defiance of three former Tory prime ministers – Boris Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron – and a significant number of backbenchers. Sunak is thought to be a long-standing HS2 sceptic and has been increasingly concerned about the ballooning cost amid high inflation; the last official estimate was ...

Oh my god he did it. He actually bloody did it. Rishi Sunak genuinely drove to Manchester, then cancelled the bit of the High Speed 2 rail link that would go to Manchester. Or did he? Perhaps not: someone close to No 10 has been rather sniffily briefing any client journalists who happen to pass that the decision has still not been taken. It is striking that no one is attempting to brief that the project will definitely go ahead, however. There are so many things about this that are completely and utterly ridiculous. Firstly there’s the almost gleeful lack of interest in optics. I had genuinely assumed that ministers would hum and haw and tell us no decision had yet been ...

The civil service; the unemployed; declinists; non-working families; Gordon Brown; the Office for National Statistics: these were some of Jeremy Hunt's targets in his Conservative conference speech in Manchester today. The Chancellor was buoyant after the recent upwards revision in UK GDP (showing the economy is 1.8 per cent larger than before Covid-19). But his headline announcements were vague. He wants to tighten sanctions for those on benefits to encourage them to get into work. The concession in the other direction was a promise to raise the minimum wage to £11 next year, regardless of what the Low Pay Commission recommends. This is not as radical as Hunt implied: in April this year the minimum wage was raised by nearly ...

The queue for the pro-growth rally at Conservative conference, featuring none other than lettuce impersonator Liz Truss, started forming 90 minutes before she took to the stage. It turns out that overseeing a historic crash in both the economy and your party’s poll ratings is not enough to deter hundreds of party members (and any journalist who could get on the list) from cramming into Manchester's Midland Hotel to hear from the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister. Perhaps for some this was part of the attraction – rubber-necking at the car-crash former PM to see what new calamity would unfold. But the 300-capacity Trafford Suite was packed (apparently another 200 people had been turned away) and the reception Truss received was as ...

The rumours around the Tory Party are that the campaigning brains want to plan a presidential push around Rishi Sunak. With the party brand in the mud, their search for electoral salvation will mean putting the Prime Minister to the fore – with more interviews, more access, and overall more Sunakism. The temptation is an obvious one. Ever since he took office, Sunak’s personal ratings have been higher than those of the party he leads. Promoting him is a chance to capitalise on this, and to distance the current incarnation from the chaos of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. There is, however, one fundamental problem: Sunak can’t campaign. Sunak has glided to the top of politics without ever really fighting a tough ...

There’s a map doing the rounds on social media at the moment which shows the scale of Japan’s Shinkansen rail network: 2,800km of high-speed trains, a system so vast that, superimposed onto the UK, it stretches from somewhere east of Shetland to the northern edge of the Bay of Biscay. Beneath it, in the southern half of Great Britain, you can see the original Y-shaped plan for HS2, a tiny little stub by comparison. We are struggling to build even that. Rishi Sunak, a man who gives the impression that he wakes up screaming after nightmares about being forced to travel by train, lopped off the eastern arm, to the East Midlands, Yorkshire and points north, while he was chancellor. This, ...