Beaten in early September by Liz Truss, Conservative Rishi Sunak looks very close to Downing Street after Boris Johnson’s withdrawal from the race. A win would make him the first…
Beaten in early September by Liz Truss, Conservative Rishi Sunak looks very close to Downing Street after Boris Johnson’s withdrawal from the race. A victory would make him the UK’s first non-white head of government.
Without his former boss facing him and with another candidate, Penny Mordaunt, lagging behind in terms of sponsorships, Rishi Sunak, a 42-year-old former finance minister, has every chance of being named Prime Minister on Monday.
Following the resignation of Liz Truss on Thursday after 44 days in office, Rishi Sunak returned to the front of the stage with maximum credibility.
Liz Truss, who had won in early September against Rishi Sunak, was hijacked by her budget policy which set fire to the market and her unpopularity.
But Rishi Sunak had warned the Tories during the campaign this summer that the Truss program was a “fairy tale” and that his massive tax cuts would lead to higher borrowing costs.
To his supporters, Mr Sunak’s message in the previous Downing Street campaign about the need for economic prudence to fight inflation showed he is the man for the job. His budgetary prudence, because of which he was considered too central and too calm, is now reassuring.
Already last summer, this conservative, grandson of Indian immigrants, was the favorite candidate of “Tory” MPs.
But he was often accused of being a technocrat out of touch with the people. And by confronting Liz Truss, he paid for knocking on the door of Johnson’s government in early July, followed by around sixty colleagues. He was accused by a part of the base of having betrayed Boris Johnson, with whom he remained at loggerheads.
Elite course
Rishi Sunak was elected Member of Parliament for Yorkshire (in the north of England) in 2015. Barely five years later, he took the coveted post of finance minister at the age of 39, just before the pandemic began.
This early Brexit supporter gained popularity by giving billions of pounds of state aid during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But his wealth, amassed during his career in finance and through his marriage to Akshata Murty, the daughter of an Indian multibillionaire, is sometimes troubled as Britons tighten their belts.
In the face of these criticisms, this fan of the Star Wars saga willingly tells his family’s story, a success story like those conservatives.
Born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton, on the south coast of England, Rishi Sunak is the eldest of three children and the son of a GP in the public health system and a pharmacist. Born in India or of Indian descent, his grandparents emigrated from East Africa to the UK in the 1960s.
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“My family immigrated here 60 years ago. (My mother) ran the local pharmacy in Southampton. That’s where I grew up, in the shop, dealing drugs. I worked as a waiter at the Indian restaurant down the road,” he said during the last leadership campaign. “I’m here thanks to the hard work, sacrifice and love of my parents.”
Rishi Sunak, however, quickly rose to the elite by attending Winchester College, a very posh boarding school for boys. He then studied politics, philosophy and economics at the prestigious universities of Oxford, England and Stanford, USA.
Before entering politics, he worked in finance, notably at Goldman Sachs, and founded his own investment company.
The father of two daughters took an oath on the Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit text considered one of the foundational scriptures of Hinduism, when he was elected MP in 2015.
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Rishi Sunak and his supporters at a meeting, August 31, 2022 in London
• Susannah Ireland
Former British economy minister Rishi Sunak on October 23, 2022 in London
• ISABEL babies
