Yahoo News Who is Rishi Sunak? PM battles to stay in power after election gamble
As the prime minister calls a snap election, here’s everything you need to know about Rishi Sunak
Rishi Sunak enjoyed an astonishingly rapid ascent through the Tory party to become prime minister in 2022.
A multimillionaire former hedge fund manager with an MBA from Stanford University in California and married to the daughter of one India’s richest men, he has however found it hard to shed the perception he is remote from the concerns of ordinary Britons.
Early life
Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980, the eldest of three children. His Indian parents both arrived from East Africa in the 1960s. A football-mad boy whose childhood idol was Matt Le Tissier, Sunak was described by the family’s neighbours as a child with “lovely manners”.
In his youngest years, the PM attended Oakmount, a local private prep school, and later Stroud School in Romsey. According to a recent biography, fellow pupil Ollie Case said: “He was someone that was talked about. The teachers would say: ‘He’s going to be prime minister'."
But, growing up in the 1980s and 90s, he also remembers experiencing racism. “My mother was obsessed with us not having accents,” Sunak has said.
Sunak's family
Sunak is married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of an Indian entrepreneur and multi-billionaire. The pair first met in 2004 at Stanford University, his future wife apparently attracted to his “honesty and integrity”.
Five years later they married in a two-day Indian wedding held in Bangalore. The couple have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka, who will turn 13 and 11 this year, both of whom are largely kept out of the public eye.
His parents
Yashvir Sunak, Rishi’s father, was born in Kenya. He arrived in the UK to study medicine and then stayed, becoming an NHS GP. His mother, Usha, was born in Tanzania and is a pharmacist.
The couple met in Britain and settled in Southampton in the 1970s. Usha is still the director and lead pharmacist at Sunak Pharmacy in Southampton.
His education
As a teenager Sunak studied at Winchester College where he was, he says, a self-confessed “geek”. According to a recent biography, the “naughtiest” thing the prime minister did during his school days “was to smuggle a hand-held television into the school so that he did not miss any key games of Euro 96”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone with such an unblemished record, he went on to become the school’s head boy. Sunak worked while studying, delivering medicines for his mother’s pharmacy and as a waiter at a local Indian restaurant.
After school, Sunk read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating in 2001 with a first class degree. While still at university he held an internship at the Conservative Party campaign headquarters and joined the party, but went on studying before entering politics.
He earned his MBA from Stanford in 2006 as a Fulbright Scholar, meaning he was selected among the most promising candidates from the UK.
How much is he worth?
As prime minister, Rishi Sunak earns £80,807 on top of a salary of £84,144 for being an MP. But his current income from Westminster pales in comparison to his family’s vast wealth through marriage.
The Sunday Times valued the couple’s joint fortune at £730m. Murty's father is the co-founder of Infosys, an Indian tech conglomerate, in which she holds shares estimated at around £430m. Her family is also involved in a £900m business arrangement with Amazon in India, and she is a shareholder of multiple other companies.
Before entering politics Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs and a series of hedge funds. He is also known to have invested in blind trusts, in which investments are made without holders knowing where the funds are located. These arrangements reportedly hold Sunak’s own multi-million-pound fortune.
His religion
Sunak is not only the first prime minister of colour and of Indian heritage but he is also the first practising Hindu to hold the biggest job in UK politics.
He has spoken of his pride in his Hindu faith, saying, “that’s how I was raised, and that’s how I am”. He said: “Having faith gives you resilience, gives you strength that is important and it provides an outlook on life which I find particularly valuable.”
