With one speech, Sunak tore up the Tory rulebook and started all over again. Good for him...

‘Super’ Sunak is an agent of change and is spearheading a break with the past, writes Sean O’Grady – including, with his earth-scorching conference speech, the last 13 years of Tory rule...

Is it a bird? It is a plane? Is it a high speed rail service? No, it’s Super Sunak! (EPA)

What drove Rishi Sunak, the mild-mannered competent technocrat, to become an iconoclastic railway vandal? Like Clark Kent transforming into Superman, we have seen a new Sunak emerge in recent weeks, as if he’d popped into a phone box and jettisoned an awful lot of baggage in favour of a new way of doing politics. The “S” on his chest stands for Super Sunak – and he can fly!

He smashed the cross-party consensus on net zero, slammed the brakes on the “war on motorists”, and derailed HS2, a Tory flagship policy since the days when David Cameron and George Osborne were running the show. Indeed Sunak, a poodle-turned-XL bully, mauled all of his Tory predecessors and their administrations over the last 30 years – John Major, Ken Clarke, Micheal Heseltine, Cameron, Osborne, Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng – the whole lot of them.

Sunak denounced them for operating within a failed political consensus (which will be news to Johnson and Truss at any rate), and for institutional short-termism. No matter that Sunak was Johnson’s chancellor of the exchequer and, presumably, an enthusiastic Conservative from an early age.