British Finance Minister Rishi Sunak in London, United Kingdom on September 24, 2020
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Rishi Sunak, who will become Britain’s first minority prime minister after being appointed as the new leader of the Conservative Party on Monday, is a billionaire former banker, the grandson of Indian immigrants and an advocate of budget orthodoxy.
Sunak has emerged as the only candidate to succeed Liz Truss, who was forced from power last week by the same Conservatives after only a month and a half of sowing chaos with her fiscal policies, and is now taking revenge.
In September, he lost to her in the race to replace Boris Johnson despite warning that his rival’s ultra-liberal economic plans were “utopian” in times of high inflation.
This wisdom, which earned him the nickname “socialist” by some on the right, now makes him the right person to reassure markets and stabilize an economy threatened by recession.
All this despite the fact that many Britons consider him an overly wealthy technocrat out of touch with the lives of the population and Johnson’s supporters consider him a “traitor” who, with his resignation as finance minister in July, led to the downfall of the controversial leader.
– The first Hindu in power –
After just five years in the Conservative Party, Sunak, little-known to the general public despite being the UK’s richest MP, was appointed finance minister by Johnson in February 2020.
Thus, he became the first Briton of Indian origin and Hindu religion to hold this portfolio. In the past, he took oath on the Bhagavad Gita, a holy book of Hinduism, written in Sanskrit. Now he has become the first prime minister of this community, and the first non-white president, precisely when Diwali, an important five-day Hindu holiday, begins.
A month after coming into government in 2020, the outbreak of the pandemic allowed him to quickly distinguish himself from the controversial image of his boss: thanks to his massive public aid package, Sunak rose as one of the most popular members of the government. While Johnson was severely criticized for his erratic management of the health crisis.
The image of politicians is as contradictory as night and day.
With the appearance of a class leader, Sunak appears highly organised, meticulous, always combed, dressed in smart designer clothes and with a permanent smile on his lips.
He claims that he does not drink alcohol and is very concerned with his serious and modern image on social networks, where he has been criticized for appearing with expensive technological devices that show how different his life is from the life of the average British citizen.
– List of great fortunes –
He was born on May 12, 1980 in Southampton, on the south coast of England, the eldest of three children to parents who were a general practitioner and a pharmacist.
He is originally from India, and his grandparents immigrated to British East Africa in the 1960s.
Sunak, who claims he was a victim of racism in a fast food restaurant as a teenager, attended Winchester College, an elegant private boarding school for boys, and studied politics, philosophy and economics at the prestigious British and American universities of Oxford. Stanford Universities.
It was in California that he met his wife, the very wealthy Indian heiress Akshata Murty, daughter of the co-founder of the tech giant Infosys, with whom he has two daughters.
Sunak, the Brexit campaigner, declares himself a fan of cricket, football and the “Star Wars” film saga.
Before entering politics, he earned millions working as an investment banker at companies such as Goldman Sachs and founded his own financial institution. Last May, he became the first senior political official in the United Kingdom to enter the list of high net worth.
He and his wife are worth an estimated 730 million pounds ($910 million, 860 million euros).
His popularity plummeted when, once coronavirus restrictions were lifted, he cut aid and began raising taxes to comply with budget doctrine.
“For me, being a conservative means being responsible for money, both the people’s money and public finances,” he justified to members of his party who criticized him for this unpopular policy.
His image was also damaged by a scandal over his wife’s advantageous tax situation.
Murty is registered as a “non-resident” in the UK, and has avoided paying taxes in the country on her millionaire overseas income. The maneuver was legal but not viewed so well that he ended up changing his tax status.
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