A tieless Rishi Sunak bounced on stage wearing (as far as I could see) a grey sweater, chinos and brown shoes for a question and answer session.
The venue was Birmingham’s International Conference centre and the occasion the Conservative Spring Forum. The Prime Minister had dispensed with a speech altogether. Was he setting a precedent for Party Conference this autumn?
It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. Sunak struggles to give a speech without appearing simply to read from a script. But put him on the spot and he comes alive.
Engaging with questions allows him to show he’s mastered the subject – and whatever one might say about the Prime Minister, I’ve never seen it claimed that he doesn’t do his homework.
Question-and-answer is a less formal business than a platform speech, and so perhaps better suited to the spirit of the age, with its taste for informality, accessibility and spontaneity.
Obviously, the audience was well-disposed to him (I’d describe the applause when he entered as warm rather than fervent) and the questions a very long way from hostile.
All the same, he had to cover questions from the floor on the gender pay gap, local councils taking credit for national government spending, contesting elections in Labour-held areas, solar farms on agricultural land, the Met, childcare and women candidates.
Most of those subjects were par for the course – after a preliminary session which largely focused on his five priorities – and Sunak wasn’t in the business of new announcements.
Nonetheless, what frequently struck me from the back of the hall (I’d come to the forum for ConservativeHome’s reception later that day) was what he didn’t say, rather than what he did.
So on small boats, he didn’t use Suella Braverman-type language about an “invasion”. Rather, he made the “moral case” for stopping the entries.
That stresses the profits made by criminals, the danger to those in the boats, the affront to those refugees who claim asylum via safe and legal routes and the right of Britain to control its borders.
He also referenced the use of expensive hotels for accomodation which, during times when renting is expensive and ownership often unaffordable, is an especially sensitive subject for lots of voters. I bet in comes up big in focus groups.
On solar farms, he made the point that Grant Shapps heads a new department for Energy Security and Net Zero: please note the order.
The department’s website lists its top priority as “ensuring security of energy supply this winter, next winter and in the longer-term bringing down energy bills and reducing inflation”.
Government energy policy has three main aims to balance: keeping bills down, reducing emissions, and security of supply. Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and the aftermath of Covid have shifted policy towards the last.
Ministers recognise that the green technologies can’t ensure that objective on their own in the short-term (and perhaps not in the medium-term either). So Sunak is shifting his ground – and I’ve never read him as an enthusiast for Net Zero in any event.
On childcare, he said that “all of you who run a business will know that we need workers”. That went to the heart of the announcement in the Budget the week before last.
The big question for Ministers about childcare policy is: what’s the objective? Is it to maximise parental choice? Or to get parents, usually mothers, into the labour market?
Government’s answer since Gordon Brown through the Coalition to the present day is the latter. I think it’s the wrong one, but Ministers are preoccupied, understandably enough, with our present labour market shortages.
The Prime Minister also rowed in behind the windfall tax on oil and gas companies more emphatically than I’d previously heard, arguing that it is “reasonable to tax those windfall profits” to “use that money to help pay people’s energy bills”.