The Conservative mayor for the West Midlands is considering quitting over Rishi Sunak’s decision to cancel the high-speed train line between Birmingham and Manchester, the Guardian has learned.
Andy Street has met the prime minister on multiple occasions over the past few weeks as he pushes for a last-minute reprieve for the northern leg of HS2, according to Conservative sources.
However, it became clear on Wednesday morning that his lobbying efforts had failed, as Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, confirmed the line from Birmingham to Manchester would be upgraded, but not enough to count as high speed.
A resignation by a Conservative figure with as high a profile as Street would be likely to overshadow the prime minister’s keynote speech on Wednesday and would undermine his argument that he was taking decisions for the long-term good of the country.
A source close to Street said: “He is very disappointed. He wants to see what today brings but it is certainly possible that he will resign immediately after the prime minister’s speech.”
A spokesperson for the mayor said: “We intend to listen to the prime minister’s speech and respond accordingly.”
Sunak will address Conservative members at the Manchester Central conference venue – a former train station – later on Wednesday. In his speech he will argue that voters have become exhausted with a broken system of Westminster politics and will announce a series of new policies as he looks to position himself as the “change” candidate ahead of the next election.
Much of the conference has been dominated by uncertainty over the multibillion-pound HS2 scheme, which the prime minister has been reviewing for weeks.
As details emerged earlier in the week about the changes Sunak intends to make to the scheme, including abandoning plans for a high-speed link north of Birmingham, Street launched a public campaign to save the plans. He warned that giving up on the scheme would amount to “cancelling the future”.
Street has met the prime minister more than once in the last two weeks as he pushed to save the scheme, including persuading some of the project’s largest contractors to offer to slash their own costs. The mayor said on Tuesday: “The prime minister and I spoke last week about the difficulty, and I understand his difficulty and I said I would help him find a solution.”
One person close to Street said he was continuing to negotiate with Downing Street on Wednesday morning, just hours before the prime minister was due to speak, in an attempt to extract some form of concession.
Downing Street did not respond to a request to comment, but Shapps made clear in interviews on Wednesday morning that there would be no high speed line to Manchester.
The defence secretary told BBC Breakfast: “HS2 trains will run to Manchester, so they’ll still come into Manchester Piccadilly, they’ll still run to Leeds, there will still be a much faster journey time than there has been in the past.
“And not just because some of the section will be actually conventional high speed, or new high-speed rail, but also because even the older section can have further upgrades to, for example, its digital infrastructure, which is the way the signalling works.”
When Shapps was transport secretary he was an enthusiastic backer of the scheme. Asked by the BBC’s Nick Robinson why he had changed his mind, he replied “coronavirus”, saying the pandemic had reduced passenger numbers on the west coast mainline.