Rishi Sunak will tomorrow confirm he is scrapping the HS2 link between Manchester and Birmingham, Coffee House understands. The prime minister will make the announcement in his conference speech as part of an argument about responsible government. He will, though, try to soften the political blow by detailing alternative rail projects in the north of England using the money.

The row about HS2 has dominated the Conservative party conference, with Sunak insisting only today that he wouldn’t be rushed into making a ‘premature’ decision about the future of the line. It seems he has now made that decision – or he has managed to stick to his own media grid which planned to announce the decision tomorrow, rather than rush it out when the news started to leak early. Sunak sees refusing to bow to the demands of the 24 hour news cycle as a virtue, but this does mean he has spent more of conference discussing what he isn’t doing than the things he wants the public to thank him for at the next election. A week of rumours about the high speed line hasn’t taken the pressure out of the political row, either.

All eyes will be on West Midlands mayor Andy Street, who has refused to rule out resigning if the project is scrapped. Mayors are supposed to be an independent voice for their regions but Street has already framed the potential decision to scrap the northern link as being the end of levelling up and a snub to the future, undermining the party conference slogan about long-term decisions for a brighter future.

Even Tory MPs who don’t really care one way or the other about HS2 are hoping that tomorrow’s speech gives their voters some sense of why they should stick with the Conservatives at the next election. They say that the mood on the doorstep in recent months has gone from anger to a desire for reassurance from the Tories as Labour has so far failed to entice voters. The big news tonight might be about what Sunak wants to scrap, but he also needs to give voters a vision of what he wants to do, too.