Rishi Sunak
Rishi Sunak was prime minister of the United Kingdom from October 2022 to July 2024, the first of Asian descent and the first Hindu, the youngest in two centuries at forty-two, the Goldman Sachs analyst and hedge-fund partner married to the daughter of an Indian software billionaire, who had been chancellor for the pandemic, paying the wages of ten million people on furlough and the meals of the Eat Out to Help Out summer. He took the office without a contest when Truss fell, the party's MPs having decided that the members should not be asked again. The twenty months were the repair, with the mini-budget reversed and the inflation brought from eleven per cent to two, the strikes of the nurses, the doctors and the railways sat out. There was the Windsor framework of February 2023 that settled the Northern Ireland trade border with the European Union, and the Rwanda scheme for asylum seekers that the supreme court struck down and the parliament re-legislated and no flight ever took. There were the five pledges of January 2023 of which he met two, and the smoking ban for anyone born after 2009 that Starmer's parliament passed. There were the AI safety summit at Bletchley, the Post Office scandal's television drama and the law that quashed the convictions. There was the general election he called for 4 July 2024 in the rain in Downing Street with no umbrella, six months early and twenty points behind, which the Conservatives lost with a hundred and twenty-one seats, the fewest in their history, after he had left the D-Day commemorations in Normandy early for a television interview. He was born in Southampton in 1980 to parents of Punjabi descent from East Africa, a GP and a pharmacist, went to Winchester, read PPE at Lincoln College, Oxford, and took an MBA at Stanford as a Fulbright scholar, where he met Akshata Murty. He worked for Goldman Sachs and two hedge funds, and entered parliament for Richmond in Yorkshire in 2015, Hague's old seat, as a Brexiteer. He was Johnson's chief secretary and then, in February 2020 when Javid resigned rather than sack his advisers, chancellor. His resignation in July 2022, with Javid's, was what brought Johnson down. The wealth, the non-domiciled tax status of his wife that the papers found in 2022, the fine for the lockdown birthday cake he had attended with Johnson, the helicopter and the Coke Zero were the material his opponents used. The Conservatives' shrinking to a rump between Labour and Reform was the arithmetic. He stayed as MP for Richmond, and resigned the party's leadership on the night. He has since joined the advisory boards of Microsoft and Goldman Sachs and a fellowship at Stanford, at forty-five, with the record of the first prime minister to lead his party to a defeat of that size, and of the last Conservative one for some time.
- Lived: 1980 CE – ?
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime minister, politician
