But where is Sunak's £36bn for small towns coming from?

Even if you agree with stopping the HS2 project and spending the money on smaller transport schemes in the North instead, Rishi Sunak is not necessarily going to get your vote.

- JOHN RENTOUL

The prime minister claims to have saved £36bn and suddenly has a magic money tree of spending available at a time when the public finances are squeezed. But it is all capital investment, so the “savings” can be spent only on infrastructure projects.

The list of schemes – road, rail, train and bus – that he read out in his speech to cries of “more!”, sounded impressive. “There is more; there’s lots more,” Sunak said. But having just cancelled one big, long-term project, why would the voters think that he will see hundreds of slightly less long-term ones through?

Promising to use those funds to boost the infrastructure of the country more widely sounds like maintenance to me – rather than capital investment. It is going to take several years to see results. Not as long as HS2, which wasn’t expected to reach Manchester until the 2040s anyway, but certainly after the election.

The only other thing in Sunak’s list – and again it is not a capital item, so it should not have been in there – was his promise to “keep the £2 bus fare across the whole country”. That is something that matters to a lot of people, many of them poor, but it is not much of a return on cancelling a multi-billion-pound bullet train.