Rishi Sunak’s looks all but certain to be named Britiain’s new prime minister – and its first Hindu leader, just in time for Diwali – after an extraordinarily turbulent year in Westminster and for him personally.
It was his resignation from government alongside Sajid Javid on 5 July that triggered the landslide – in which almost 60 Conservative ministers followed suit over a madcap 40-hour period – that finally brought an end to Boris Johnson’s scandal-plagued premiership, setting in motion the red-hot chaos of recent months.
With Mr Johnson forced out, his former chancellor, 42, initially found himself leading the parliamentary leg of the contest to replace him but swiftly fell behind foreign secretary (and eventual winner) Liz Truss as soon as it became a straight two-horse race.
Mr Sunak’s campaign had hoped to kindle warm memories of his generosity when Covid-19 first slammed Britain into lockdown in the spring of 2020, the days of “Dishy Rishi”, the free-spending chancellor behind the £69bn furlough scheme best known for working behind his laptop in a hoodie and ferrying plates around Wagamama to promote his Eat Out to Help Out initiative.
But the Conservative Party membership were unmoved, preferring Ms Truss’s pie-in-the-sky promises to his claims that he was the ideal person to revive an ailing economy that he himself has been at the helm of for two-and-a-half-years.
The choice proved deeply unwise and Mr Sunak has since been entirely vindicated about the folly of Ms Truss’s “fairy tale” tax cuts and once again finds the keys to No 10 within his grasp.
Should his dream finally come to pass – he must still see off a challenge from Commons leader Penny Mordaunt – he would still, eventually, need to convince the British electorate that his being one of the richest MPs in government, thanks to his marriage to Indian billionaire’s daughter Akshata Murthy, need not be an obstacle to understanding the realities of poverty in the UK today.
Mr Sunak was born in Southampton on 12 May 1980, his parents Yashvir and Usha Sunak a GP and pharmacist respectively, the couple originally from East Africa with roots in Punjab, India.
The eldest of three children, Mr Sunak attended the prestigious Stroud School in Hampshire and Winchester College, where he was head boy and edited the school newspaper, waiting tables in a curry house during the school holidays to boost his coffers.
Slightly embarrassingly in hindsight, the family appeared in a BBC documentary in 2001 entitled Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, a clip of which recently resurfaced online and went viral in which the future chancellor can be seen declaring that he has working class friends, before retracting the statement as though it were absurd.
From there, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, and, according to Tatler, talked about himself as a future Conservative prime minister even then.
He then worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before joining a series of hedge funds, marrying Ms Murthy, daughter of “India’s Steve Jobs”, NR Narayana Murthy, in August 2009 and finally entering politics by becoming the MP for Richmond in the Yorkshire Dales following the 2015 general election, succeeding William Hague.
Serving as parliamentary under-secretary for local government and then chief secretary to the Treasury, he was appointed chancellor by Mr Johnson on 13 February 2020, a matter of weeks before Covid first arrived on these shores.
Popular for much of the pandemic, even Mr Sunak could not remain entirely untainted by Partygate, which first erupted, like the Omicron variant, in late 2021.
Wave after wave of damaging stories about rule-breaking wine fridge booze-ups at Downing Street while the country was in lockdown continuously rocked the Johnson premiership throughout December and January, with only the Omicron scare and Christmas providing respite.
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak leaving 10 Downing Street
The scandal whipped up real anger among the British public, already incensed by Dominic Cummings’ illicit road trip to Barnard Castle, who had been imprisoned in their own homes, frightened for the future, unable to go to work, see their friends and relatives or even say goodbye to those they lost to the virus.
Resentment festered over the PM’s apparent blithe indifference for the very people he had presumed to represent ever since they had handed him a landslide election victory two years earlier and whose faith he had repaid with a “one rule for them, another for us” approach to governance.
Mr Johnson struck an increasingly desperate and discredited figure in January as Whitehall mandarin Sue Gray gathered what looked like damning evidence against him and turned much of it over to London’s Metropolitan Police, compelling officers to launch an investigation of their own, as seething backbenchers handed in their letters of no confidence to Sir Graham Brady’s 1922 Committee in droves.
Meanwhile, over in No 11, Mr Sunak shrewdly kept his distance until he was eventually forced to concede that he had attended a Cabinet Room birthday bash for Mr Johnson.
Rishi Sunak launches his leadership campaign
Rishi Sunak with his wife Akshata Murthy
