Rishi Sunak has been warned he risks losing Tory “red wall” voters en masse, as northern MPs called on him to cut taxes, build more homes and extend devolution.
Pressure is mounting on the prime minister to move on from his initial phase of leadership, which was designed to steady the party, and press ahead with offering a more inspiring vision to voters before the next election.
Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor who is a poster boy for the party’s success in northern England and was awarded a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list, said those who voted Tory in 2019 wanted to vote for the party again.
“But at the minute, we’re not giving them the excuse and the reason to be able to do so,” he told delegates at the Northern Research Group (NRG) conference in Doncaster on Friday. “We have time. We need to deliver.”
Houchen credited Sunak and the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, for having “reintegrated” the importance of fiscal responsibility in the Conservative party, a thinly veiled swipe at Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
After Hunt courted him at a dinner on Thursday night, Houchen revealed the chancellor had made clear the need to rein in public finances before announcing any giveaways.
“As he says, the state is growing at over 2%, growth is at 1.6%. That is not fiscally responsible,” Houchen recounted.
“I think later in the year or early next year, we will start to reap the benefits of that very sensible fiscal position. And that will give the government hopefully more room to set out a brighter future, a better vision, and give time for those things to be able to be implemented.”
Other senior Tories also issued a rallying cry for Sunak to be more radical.
John Stevenson, the NRG chair, said: “If we want to win the next general election, our brand has to be improved. A leader has to inspire, the policies have to be attractive, appealing and resonate with the times and the attitudes of the people.”
The founder of the caucus, the former “northern powerhouse” minister Jake Berry, said he wanted MPs to “move from talking about lower taxes to delivering them”.
“We’re the party of low tax, but we also have to accept that we’re the government with the highest tax burden in history,” he said.
He warned of the risks of maintaining the status quo, saying that an end to what he called “blobonomics” – in which a centralised Whitehall dictates spending– would allow the party to hold its 80 seat majority.
The levelling up minister Dehenna Davison said Sunak should “be bold and brave with planning”, and that he should not fear taking on Nimbys in the party.
In an effort to burnish his credentials as a “prime minister for the north”, Sunak went straight from his US trip to the conference, where he promised the next Tory manifesto would “reaffirm that we have the energy and the ideas that are best for Britain”.
