Rishi Sunak, the millionaire of Indian origin who arrives at Downing Street with the challenge of ‘saving’ the United Kingdom

He is the new British Prime Minister and he comes loaded for the first time: he will be the first president of Indian origin and the first follower of Hinduism to hold office. However, Rishi Sunak’s differences with previous British leaders end there, because everything else in his journey is a copy of the path that the different leaders have followed: private school, University of Oxford, career in the City and affiliated with one of the majority parties, in his case, the Conservative. One more son of establishment.

The grandson of Indian immigrants, Rishi Sunak was born in Southampton, the son of a doctor and a pharmacist. Prominent members of the Hindu community of that city, to this day continue to offer a meal to the local faithful in the temple that was founded by his grandfather in 1971.

At 42 years old, Rishi Sunak is the proceeds of your parents’ investment, who saved what they could to take him to Winchester, one of the best private schools in the United Kingdom, where he began to rub shoulders with the London elite. “It was a guaranteed success,” his mother would tell in a BBC documentary in 2001, “you had a very good education, you got a good job and respect, you climbed the social ladder and everything became easier.

He graduated in 2002, began working at the banking and investment group Goldman Sachs, a position he left in 2004 to study an MBA at Stanford, in the US, until 2006. There he met his wife, Akshata Murty, billionaire and heiress to the IT firm Infosys empire, whom he married in 2009 in Bangalore. After a few years in the US, they returned to the UK in 2013, the year in which Sunak fully entered politics with the help of the Tories. The script, if the parents ever imagined it, was shot with the climax: arriving at Downing Street at the age of 42.

“The choice our party makes now will decide whether the next generation of Britons will have more opportunities than the last. That is why I am running to be your next Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party,” Sunak said when presenting his candidacy for the leadership of the party.

[Rishi Sunak, nuevo primer ministro de Reino Unido: el hijo de dos hindúes llega al 10 de Downing Street]

Sunak came to the House of Commons in 2015, led by David Cameron and, in the ‘Brexit’ referendum, despite Cameron’s campaign for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union, Sunak supports leaving the country . “It is a unique opportunity for this generation, for our country to take control of its destiny. I know that leaving will bring us some uncertainty, but I believe that our nation will be freer, fairer and more prosperous outside the European Union“, he said then in a manifesto in favor of ‘Brexit’.

Already with Theresa May at the helm of the country, Rishi Sunak rises to the position of parliamentary undersecretary of state for local government, in one of the government remodeling that the president was forced to carry out. When May resigns, Sunak supports the candidacy of Boris Johnson without cracks.

Arriving in Downing Street, Johnson reciprocates support with an appointment to the post of chief secretary of the Treasury and, seven months later, Sunak rises to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer and becomes the second most powerful politician in the country.

A few weeks after taking office, the Covid-19 pandemic settles in the United Kingdom and Sunak becomes one of the best known faces for its citizens. As Johnson urged citizens to stay home, Sunak announced a extensive financial aid scheme amounting to hundreds of billions of poundsto support workers and companies with government funds.

In his daily television appearances, Sunak begins to stand out above Boris Johnson: his professional and serious demeanor contrasts with Johnson’s chaotic tone and in some sectors of the party the then Minister of the Economy is beginning to be talked about as the possible successor of the premiere.

controversies

However, the controversies of partygate, which dictated the fall from grace of Boris Johnson, have not left Sunak untainted either. When the premiere was fined for having celebrated his birthday with a party during the lockdown, Sunak received the same punishment for having attended said celebration.

In addition, his wife was involved in a tax scandal, when it came to light that he did not pay his taxes in the United Kingdom, something that has tarnished his popularity. His detractors also make him ugly because of his too ostentatious behavior-in one of the debates in which he has participated before the primaries against Liz Truss it was news on 4,000 euro tailored suit and the 500 euro shoes he was wearing – which, they say, demonstrates their lack of empathy with the reality of citizens.

When the siege on Boris Johnson tightened enough, Sunak was the second to turn his back on him and tendered his resignation from the Government, precipitating the cascade of abandonments that ended up sentencing the fate of the former prime minister. Since then, he began the campaign for the leadership of the party, a career that he saw cut short by the election of Liz Truss.

His policy of raising taxes, very unpopular within the Tories, seemed to take its toll. Despite declaring himself a firm supporter of a tax reduction policy, Sunak has always maintained that this was not the time to do so and that a measure like that would lead the country to greater indebtedness and would drive a higher rise in inflation. If he came to power, Sunak promised more aid to deal with the exponential rise in energy prices this winter.

As he assured the BBCpreferred “lose the election to win it with a false promise”. In light of the markets’ response to Liz Truss’s actions, and her fateful fate, Sunak was right. This Sunday, the current Minister of the Economy, Jeremy Hunt, appointed by Liz Truss to fix the economic catastrophe caused by her measures, endorsed Rishi Sunak’s fiscal policy. “He will make the decisions that are necessary for our long-term prosperity,” he has said.

The fall of Liz Truss confirmed his prognosis and gave him a second chance to rise to power. Now he has the titanic task of restoring stability to a country that for a few months has known no other reality than political and economic upheaval.