Conservative leadership contender Rishi Sunak has sparked cross-party outrage after he was filmed telling party members in Tunbridge Wells how he had moved money from “disadvantaged urban areas” to fund projects in Kent’s commuter belt.
The former UK chancellor’s comments, made in a sunny garden, appeared to cut through the government’s rhetoric about “levelling” Britain and spreading wealth beyond the south-east.
Sunak said he had changed the Treasury’s funding formulas to ensure areas like Tunbridge Wells get “the funding they deserve”, in a video clip obtained by the New Statesman magazine that quickly went viral.
He said: “We inherited a lot of formulas from the Labor party that pushed all the funding into deprived urban areas . . . that had to be undone. I started work to undo that.”
While Sunak’s message may have gone down well with some of the Tory members voting for the UK’s next party leader and prime minister this summer, it didn’t travel far beyond the posh town of Tunbridge Wells.
Jake Berry, chair of the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs and a supporter of Sunak’s rival, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, said that in public Sunak “claims he wants to level the North, but here he boasts try to channel the vital investment from disadvantaged areas”.
The Labor party said it was “outrageous” that Sunak “openly bragged about setting the rules for funneling taxpayers’ money into wealthy Tory counties”. Deputy Labor leader Angela Rayner joked: “And then Rishi Sunak wonders why he has no working-class friends.”
Sunak last year denied he was involved in “pork barrel politics”, after the Financial Times revealed that 40 of the 45 cities receiving £1bn through new “city deals” had Tory MPs.
Mr Sunak said on Friday that in Tunbridge Wells he had been “making the case that deprivation exists across our country and it needs to be tackled and so we need to make sure our funding formulas recognize that”.
“The people who need help and additional investment are not just limited to large urban areas. You’ll find them in cities across the UK and also in rural areas,” he added.
A Truss ally said: “I almost feel sorry for him. He’s running a terrible campaign and he’s come out with a bunch of policies that he clearly doesn’t believe in because he’s so desperate.”
With ballots landing on Friday, some Tory veterans believe the race is already over, with Sunak trailing Truss badly in party member polls.
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Although Sunak has targeted associations in the south-east of England, where most of the party’s membership is based, two veteran campaigners said those areas had also turned against him.
“Rishi was hoping to win the home counties but he doesn’t seem to have realized that Liz’s tax cut policies are popular with us,” said one campaigner.
A former cabinet minister who supported Truss said: “As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t end any more for Rishi. He’s committed the cardinal sin of making the Tories feel like they’ve screwed over the poor.”