Yahoo News Rishi Sunak’s stratospheric rise from squeaky clean student to prime minister
Over the Easter holidays, as talk of a Tory leadership challenge hit fever pitch, Rishi Sunak settled down in No 10 with his daughters to watch Bend it Like Beckham.
The cult 2002 comedy charts the journey of teenager Jess Bhamra, who defies her strict British Indian parents to pursue her dream of playing professional football.
It is perhaps incongruous therefore that it is a favourite film of a man who, throughout his career in business and politics, has always been known for playing by the rules.
Rishi Sunak was born at Southampton General Hospital on May 12 1980 to parents who had emigrated from east Africa to the UK two decades earlier.
Yashvir, his father, came to Britain from Nairobi in 1966 and studied medicine at the University of Liverpool before working as an NHS family GP. He met his wife Usha, who was born in Tanzania, while she was working as a pharmacist and the couple married in her then hometown of Leicester in 1977.
Shortly afterwards they moved to Southampton where Rishi, the eldest of three children, grew up in a modest detached house with his brother Sanjay and sister Raakhi.
He fondly remembers Saturday nights at the family home, eating KFC and Pizza Hut takeaways in the living room and watching episodes of The A-Team.
Mr Sunak has jokingly recalled how he and his siblings had to sit on a plastic picnic mat on the floor to eat because his mother was “very protective” of the sofas.
As a youngster, he attended Stroud School, a leading independent prep school, before earning a place at Winchester College at the age of 13.
When he failed to gain a scholarship to the latter, as had been expected, his parents had to take on extra work to afford the fees, which today stand at £36,000 a year.
Despite that temporary setback, Mr Sunak, described as good-looking and with an easy charm, was quickly picked out for potential greatness by teachers and classmates.
A popular student who was academically strong and with a spotless behavioural record, he became the first pupil from an Indian background to rise to the post of head boy.
He is remembered as a squeaky clean student whose only real transgression was smuggling a portable TV into his boarding house to watch England games at Euro ’96.
It was at school that the young Rishi developed his passion for cricket, although so hyper-competitive was Winchester that he could only make the third team.
His time at the 14th-century college also saw the future prime minister make his first foray into politics. Sunak became the editor of the school newspaper, the Wykehamist, which he used to espouse conservative ideas that were out of fashion with the times.
Warning about pro-Europe Labour at age of 16
After watching the election night coverage in 1997, he wrote an essay for the publication warning of the dangers of a “worrying pro-European” Labour government.
Of Sir Tony Blair, he wrote: “He revels in the label of a patriot but has plans for the possible break-up of the United Kingdom and membership of an eventual European Superstate.”
The piece, written when he was just 16, defies claims by some that he was not a genuine Brexiteer and only supported the Leave campaign out of political expediency.
Away from school, Rishi spent some of his time helping his mother run the family pharmacy in Southampton, doing her accounts and depositing cash at the bank.
He has spoken about how the experience taught him Conservative principles, comparing it to Margaret Thatcher’s upbringing above her father’s grocery store.
Summer as a waiter in curry house
After sitting his A-levels and winning a place at Lincoln College, Oxford, he spent the summer of his 18th birthday working as a waiter in a curry house owned by a family friend.
Mr Sunak has said that his father pushed him into getting the job at Kuti’s Brasserie, near Southampton docks because he wanted to teach his son the value of hard work.
Mr Sunak instantly excelled in this environment, too, rising from a table clearer at the start of his employment to a fully fledged waiter by the time he left.
The Prime Minister has repeatedly talked about these formative years as his most important and has credited his parents with being the inspiration for his career in politics.
After that summer of waiting tables, Rishi left home in Southampton and moved to Oxford, where in time-honoured fashion he studied philosophy, politics and economics.
He is recalled as a low-key student, little known outside his own college. Despite his political leanings, he was not involved in the university’s Conservative association.
Michael Rosen, his tutor at the time, has said there was a “joke” among his contemporaries that he wanted to be a Tory prime minister, but that nobody took his ambitions too seriously.
During his time in the city of dreaming spires, Mr Sunak developed a surprising love of clubbing, hitting the dancefloor three times a week even though he was teetotal.
While out with friends in Oxford’s teeming bars and pubs, he would always order Coca-Cola, the sugary soft drink to which he has admitted being addicted.
In spite of his love for the nightlife, he graduated with a first in 2001 and, as had been widely expected by his fellow students, immediately got a job in the City.
Mr Sunak moved to Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, where former colleagues remember him being marked out by his “mentality of flawless execution”.
He left three years later and moved to California as a Fulbright Scholar, a cultural exchange scheme, earning a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University.
That decision to head to the United States would prove a hugely significant one for him, as it was at Stanford that he met his future wife Akshata Murty.
At first, the pair were just friends but Mr Sunak was determined to change that, even taking up running so that he could spend more time with Miss Murty, who was a keen jogger.
While he was the son of a doctor, she was the daughter of India’s third-richest man, N R Narayana Murthy, the founder of the multi-billion pound software firm Infosys.
The pair quickly became known at Stanford as a “power couple” who wanted to make a difference, though they went to lengths not to parade their great wealth.
After completing their studies, the pair moved to London where Mr Sunak got a job as a hedge fund manager at the Children’s Investment Fund.
Contemporaries who spoke to Tatler magazine described him as one of the “handsome and thin smooth-talkers” who populated the City in the mid-noughties.
Mr Sunak proposed to Miss Murty as they enjoyed a walk alone together along cliffs at Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco. He then took his new fiancée for a night at an upmarket hotel nearby where they had dreamed of staying when they were students at Stanford.
The couple got married in 2009 in a two-day ceremony in Bangalore, India, which was attended by politicians and celebrities but was surprisingly modest.
After returning to the UK they invited 200 guests, including Miss Murty’s parents, to a wedding reception at Kuti’s Brasserie where Mr Sunak had waited on tables.
Aside from some leafleting and a week’s work experience at Conservative Campaign Headquarters in his first year at university, Mr Sunak had so far steered clear of politics.
That, however, was about to change, in large part thanks to his close friendship with James Forsyth, then the political editor of The Spectator, with whom he had gone to school.
In 2011 he was the best man at Forsyth’s wedding to Allegra Stratton, who at the time worked for ITV News but would later work for him in the Treasury.
The celebration was packed with high-profile politicians and introduced Mr Sunak to influential Conservative figures including Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings.
At the time he was still working in finance at Theleme Partners, a hedge fund that he had co-founded with former colleagues based out in California.
He also served two years, between 2013 and 2015, as a partner at Catamaran Ventures, an investment firm that was owned by his father-in-law.
But he had already decided to take the plunge into politics and, in 2014, he launched a bold bid to become the Conservative candidate in the most unlikely of seats.
Rishi Sunak, the city-dwelling British Indian from the south coast, threw his hat into the ring to represent Richmond, one of Yorkshire’s most rural and agricultural constituencies.
He was vying to succeed Lord Hague of Richmond, the former Tory leader and foreign secretary, who had announced he was standing down from Parliament after a 26-year career.
Blue wellies amused farmers
His campaign began in somewhat inauspicious fashion as he showed up for events in blue wellies – not the traditional countryside green –- to the bemusement of farmers.
But once more it was Mr Sunak’s tireless work ethic and an insatiable appetite for learning that eventually helped him win around the sceptical locals.
Lord Hague has recalled that, at one point during the relentless flurry of visits and meet and greets, he urged the young candidate to take a break to avoid burning out. He said that, to his shock, Mr Sunak responded by telling him that he was getting up at 5am the next morning to join a farmer milking their cows.
“You don’t really have to do that, I assured him,” the Tory grandee said. “I know, he said, but I really want to know what it’s like, I’ve got to understand for myself.”
Mr Sunak’s endeavours paid off as, at a three-hour selection vote, local members picked him from a four-strong panel which included a farmer, a former soldier and a local campaigner.
Just over six months later he clinched the seat with a near 20,000 majority, having proved a popular campaigner and earned the trust of the rural community’s hard-nosed voters.
It was the start of a stratospheric rise that would see him become chancellor less than five years later, and then Britain’s youngest prime minister in modern times.
The first major test of his political nous came just a year after he had been elected as an MP, when Lord Cameron called a referendum on leaving the European Union.
Mr Sunak was already considered one of the rising stars of the Tory party and both the Leave and Remain camps were keen to secure his support.
In the end, he stuck to his Eurosceptic principles and, despite warnings from Downing Street that his career would suffer for it, he declared his backing for Brexit.
‘The future of the party’
Upon hearing of his decision, Lord Cameron is reported to have cried in despair: “If we’ve lost Rishi, we’ve lost the future of the party.”
His career did not suffer for long and in 2018 he was rewarded by Theresa May, the new prime minister, when she made him minister for local government.
During his 18 months on the job, he led a drive for accessible toilets to be made compulsory in many new public buildings to cater for people with severe disabilities.
Mr Sunak has spoken about how seeing the change come into force in 2021, two years after he had left the role, was one of his proudest moments in politics.
That first ministerial role also gave him an opportunity to show off his slick PR skills, and he even impressed a travelling pack of journalists by buying them all coffee.
It was a small gesture, but one that demonstrated how his attention to detail on both style and substance would soon propel him to much greater political heights.
His big break came in February 2020 when Boris Johnson, fresh from his thumping election victory the preceding December, made Mr Sunak his chancellor.
The appointment came as a surprise in Westminster and raised eyebrows both within the Tory party and outside of it given the then 39-year-old’s lack of experience.
Some observers argued that the former prime minister plucked Mr Sunak from relative obscurity precisely for that reason, believing it would make him easy to control.
Mr Johnson, a high spender, shunted aside the more experienced Sajid Javid because, it was thought, he would have been more likely to challenge his largesse.
If that was indeed his logic then it quickly came off the rails, as the outbreak of the pandemic immediately thrust the new chancellor into the spotlight.
Mr Sunak quickly drew up a package of emergency support, centered on the furlough scheme, which made him one of the country’s most popular politicians.
As the photogenic young star of the Cabinet received more and more plaudits, rumours began to circle that the then prime minister, who enjoyed near-celebrity status, was wary and perhaps even jealous of his deputy’s growing reputation.
Lord Ashcroft has revealed how, on one occasion, someone said to him about Mr Sunak that “it’s nice to have a hungry young lion sitting round the Cabinet table”.
According to the Tory peer, a glum Mr Johnson is said to have replied: “I don’t want hungry young lions round the Cabinet table, I want tired old lions.”
The contrast in approach between the two men came to a head over the former prime minister’s big spending plans to “fix” social care by introducing a cap on costs.
It was an expensive policy running into tens of billions a year, and one that the then chancellor was not ready to sign off on unless the books could be balanced.
As a result Mr Johnson reluctantly agreed to increase National Insurance – which was subsequently reversed by Liz Truss – even though it broke a manifesto promise not to raise taxes.
Tensions over lockdown policies
Throughout this period there were also tensions over lockdown policies, with Mr Sunak repeatedly arguing at Cabinet for less draconian measures.
He even rushed back to the UK from a trip to the US in December 2021 when he found out that Mr Johnson was preparing to announce a new shutdown for Christmas.
Later, he recalled arguing that lockdown “would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives”.
The following spring, as Britain was emerging from the pandemic, Mr Sunak suffered arguably the low point of his political career as he was fined over partygate. Along with Mr Johnson, he was handed a fixed penalty notice for attending a small birthday gathering for the then prime minister in the Cabinet room at No 10.
It was a humbling moment for Mr Sunak, known as a stickler for the rules, although he rode out calls from Labour to resign after offering up a grovelling apology.
Partygate sent the Johnson government into a tailspin from which it was unable to recover, though it was the Chris Pincher scandal that was the final nail in its coffin.
On July 5 2022, within minutes of each other, Mr Sunak and Mr Javid resigned as chancellor and health secretary respectively, in what was a terminal blow to Mr Johnson.
In an excoriating resignation letter, he said that he was stepping down because the government was no longer being run “properly, competently and seriously”.
“I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe that these standards are worth fighting for and that is why I am resigning,” Mr Sunak wrote.
It was, of course, not to be his last ministerial job, and weeks later he put himself forward for the Tory leadership contest, making it to the final two along with Ms Truss.
Mr Sunak had won the largest support amongst Tory MPs but went into the members’ vote as the underdog, not least because of his role in Mr Johnson’s downfall.
‘Stabbing Boris in the back’
At the first leadership debate, held at Leeds United’s Elland Road ground, he was confronted by a member who accused him of “stabbing Boris in the back”.
Fuelled by a pre-debate ritual of a Twix bar and a Sprite, he went the full 12 rounds with Ms Truss as the pair toured the country taking part in hustings events.
After losing out in the final members’ vote – by a slimmer than expected 57 per cent to 43 per cent margin – he returned to life as a backbencher and his grade II listed manor house in Yorkshire.
In Westminster, things quickly unravelled for Truss as her administration imploded over the disastrous mini-budget.
When the fallout claimed the job of Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, it was Mr Sunak who called to commiserate with the man who had succeeded him in the Treasury.
Ms Truss’s resignation after just six weeks in the job sparked a second Tory leadership contest in the space of four months, and once more Mr Sunak put himself forward.
This time he was to come up against his former boss – now his political nemesis – as Mr Johnson announced his intention to throw his hat into the ring for a sensational return.
At a “mafia-esque” meeting ahead of the campaign Mr Johnson tried to persuade Mr Sunak to back his leadership attempt in return for his old job back as chancellor.
The gathering is reported to have ended with Mr Sunak coolly slapping the ex-prime minister on the back and telling him “see you at the debate” as he walked out.
In the end, there was to be no debate as Johnson pulled out of the race at the first hurdle and then, two minutes before the deadline for nominations, Penny Mordaunt also withdrew.
That left Mr Sunak as the only candidate and, after the most low-key of coronations, he headed to Downing Street to deliver his maiden speech as Prime Minister.
Behind the black door of No 10, he has endured a torrid 18 months dominated by crises, leadership rumblings and the Tories’ stubbornly poor polling ratings.
One of the first major decisions he had to make was the fate of Jeremy Hunt, who had been drafted in by Ms Truss to calm the markets in the aftermath of the mini-budget.
After some agonising, he decided not to rock the boat and kept on the Chancellor, depriving himself of the chance to appoint a natural ally to such a key role.
Those close to the Prime Minister describe him as one of the most capable holders of the office, and somebody who engenders loyalty from people who work for him.
“He has a really good team around him and he gets the best out of people,” one ally says, noting how many officials followed him from his time at the Treasury,
“People stay working for him for a very long time, which is always a good sign with leaders.”
But others warn that he can be too cautious and managerial and that his insistence on weighing up all the evidence can lead to ponderous decision-making.
One former special adviser observed that Sunak and many of the key officials around him lacked the political killer instinct that had been present under Johnson.
It is perhaps telling that, when asked recently what had been the highlight of his time in office, the Prime Minister replied that it was having the England cricket team to No 10.
Mr Sunak hosted England’s T20 World Cup-winning team in Downing Street in March 2023 and was filmed having a knockabout game with the players in the back garden.
The Prime Minister – a passionate England fan – unwinds by talking cricket with his in-laws and attends nets sessions with his cousin to take his mind off the pressures of the job.
At the other end of the spectrum, he opened up to Russell Cook – nicknamed “Hardest Geezer” for his run across Africa – about the things he has found toughest in office.
“Generally the most stressful days relate not to all the stuff you read, all the politics and what’s going on here,” he said in a video posted on social media by No 10. “The most stressful days relate to security things always, because people’s eyes are at risk, or I’m asking our soldiers to put their lives at risk.”
Mr Sunak also revealed that he draws on the Hindu philosophy of Dharma, which best translates as duty, to give him strength on the most difficult days.
“The concept is that you do your duty, that’s your purpose and you just focus on that and don’t worry about the external environment,” he explained.
‘Total Coke addict’
A teetotaller, the Prime Minister also relies on sugar to get him through the tough times and is frequently spotted around Downing Street with a slice of cake.
Red velvet and lemon drizzle are said to be his favourites and he is never far from a sugary drink, though he also prefers a strong cup of tea for his caffeine hit.
In a viral video clip, Sunak once sent two school pupils into a fit of giggles by declaring himself a “total coke addict” before quickly clarifying that he meant Coca-Cola.
His sweet tooth is only matched by his sickly pop culture choices, with the Prime Minister a self-avowed fan of Taylor Swift, Emily in Paris and Jilly Cooper novels.
Now we can add Bend It Like Beckham to the list. At the end of that film the protagonist – Jess – moves to California after helping her team to an unlikely cup final victory.
Could the Prime Minister soon be making the same journey after leading his team to defeat?
