Rishi Sunak (born May 12, 1980) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Conservative Party Leader from 2022 to 2024.
Following his defeat to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the 2024 general election, he was appointed Leader of the Opposition, a position he held from July to November 2024.
He previously served in two Cabinet positions under Boris Johnson, the latter as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022. Sunak has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Richmond and Northallerton, originally Richmond (Yorks), since 2015.
Sunak became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020. Sunak played a key role in the government’s financial reaction to the COVID-19 epidemic and its economic impact, including the furlough and Eat Out to Help Out programs, as well as the cost-of-living problem.
Sunak achieved strong approval and popularity ratings as chancellor during the early stages of the epidemic, but his popularity eventually dropped due to the 2022 cost-of-living crisis. In July 2022, he resigned as chancellor due to a government crisis, and Liz Truss defeated him in the succeeding party leadership election that September.
Sunak became Leader of the Opposition after leaving the prime minister’s office, and he led the Conservatives for nearly four months while a leadership election was held to replace him. He also created a shadow government.
He was followed by Kemi Badenoch, the Shadow Housing Secretary. He is still a backbench MP, and he may take up some publicly publicised outside work. In 2025, he also began working as a part-time senior advisor for one of his past companies, Goldman Sachs, with certain restrictions on his lobbying abilities.
Rishi Sunak Biography
Rishi Sunak was born on May 12, 1980, at Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire, to Punjabi East African-born Hindu parents from the Khatri community.
His grandparents moved from Punjab, northwestern India, to East Africa, where his mother and father were born in Tanzania and Kenya, respectively. His father was born in the Kenya Colony in 1949 and worked as a general practitioner for the National Health Service.
Sunak’s mother was born in the Tanganyika Territory (modern-day Tanzania). She was a chemist who operated the Sunak Pharmacy in Southampton from 1995 until 2014 and had an Aston University degree.
He attended Stroud School, a Romsey preparatory school, before going on to Winchester College as a dayboy and eventually becoming the college’s head boy. During his summer vacation, he worked as a waiter at Southampton’s curry eatery, Kuti’s Brasserie.
He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, and graduated with a first in 2001. During his time at university, he completed an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party. As a Fulbright Scholar, Sunak obtained a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University in 2006.
Sunak is the oldest of three siblings. His brother is a psychotherapist, and his sister works in New York as the chief of strategy and planning for Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations Global Fund for Education in Emergencies and Protracted Crises.
Career
Sunak first began working for the Conservative Party in 2010. During this time, he also became involved with Policy Exchange, a renowned Conservative think tank, where he was appointed head of the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Research Unit in 2014.
That year, Policy Exchange produced A Portrait of Modern Britain, a brochure written by Sunak and Saratha Rajeswaran, the BME unit’s deputy chief.
Sunak was chosen as the Conservative Party’s candidate for the House of Commons in 2014, representing Richmond in North Yorkshire, a safe Conservative constituency in England’s north that had previously been held by onetime party leader William Hague. Sunak won a landslide victory in May 2015.
Sunak won a landslide victory in May 2015. He entered government as a Eurosceptic who was solidly in the “leave” side on Brexit, which he claimed would make the United Kingdom “freer, fairer, and more prosperous.”
He was reelected to Parliament in 2017 and 2019, and voted three times in support of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plans.
From 2015 to 2017, he served on the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs Select Committee and as parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.
In January 2018, he was named undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government, his first ministerial post. Sunak became a vocal backer of Boris Johnson’s bid for the party’s leadership, and after Johnson was elected leader and prime minister, he promoted Sunak, appointing him as chief secretary to the Treasury in July 2019.
During Sunak’s time as second-in-command at the Treasury, tensions between his employer, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid, and Johnson grew. When Javid resigned in February 2020, Johnson replaced him with Sunak, who, at 39, became the fourth youngest person ever to hold the job.
Sunak was instantly confronted with the numerous obstacles posed by the arrival of the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic in Britain. As the British economy was hammered by government shutdowns imposed to combat the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19, Sunak used his office’s powers to try to mitigate the economic and human toll.
He implemented a massive economic-support program, allocating £330 billion ($400 billion) in emergency assistance for businesses and pay subsidies for workers, to retain jobs and alleviate the weight of the lockdown on both individuals and businesses.
These rescue programs were well-received, and the polished, poised Sunak became the government’s welcome face at daily press conferences, when the prime minister appeared less composed.
Sunak’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, which aimed to provide government-subsidized food and drinks to restaurants and pubs, was hailed as a resounding success by some observers, but critics claimed it played a significant role in the emergence of a catastrophic spike in COVID-19 cases in the autumn of 2020.
Nevertheless, the image of Sunak that emerged throughout the pandemic was that of a superslick, social-media-savvy, perfectly dressed, gorgeous, yet down-to-earth politician. “Dishy Rishi” was crowned “Britain’s Sexiest MP” in 2020.
Sunak’s dazzling brand, however, was marred by a slew of revelations in April 2022. Perhaps most damaging was the revelation that his wife, an Indian citizen and non-domiciled U.K. resident, claimed a tax status that allowed her to avoid paying British taxes on her overseas income, potentially saving her up to £20 million ($24 million) in U.K. taxes over a seven-and-a-half-year period.
While not illegal, the manoeuvre reflected poorly on Sunak, and Murthy quickly revised her tax status. Sunak’s patriotism was also called into doubt when it was revealed that he had hung on to a green card for US residency until late October 2021, which seemed to indicate a desire to keep his options open.
Finally, in April 2022, Sunak was punished by the police for being among the attendees at Johnson’s birthday celebration at his office in 2020, which violated the government’s guidelines prohibiting social gatherings during that stage of the pandemic.
Sunak said that his attendance at the celebration was unintentional and a result of arriving early for a meeting with the prime minister.
The episode, however, had far less of an impact on Sunak than the “Partygate” controversy would have on Johnson, who was already under fire.
When the series of scandals involving Johnson’s integrity and honesty expanded to include the prime minister’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations against former Conservative deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, Sunak resigned from the cabinet on July 5, 2022, alongside Javid, who was then the health secretary.
Their conspicuous resignations contributed significantly to the surge of discontent inside the Conservative Party, which eventually prompted Johnson to resign as party leader.
Although some Tories viewed Sunak’s actions as disloyal, he was quick to declare his ambition to succeed Johnson as leader with a cleverly crafted campaign video aired shortly after Johnson announced his resignation.
With Johnson serving as caretaker prime minister until the party could select a replacement for him, the parliamentary party (sitting Conservative MPs) began a series of votes that gradually reduced the field of candidates for the leadership from eight to two.
Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss were the final two names submitted to the party’s entire membership for a vote. Sunak aspired to be the first person of colour and Hindu to lead Britain.
To accomplish this, he would have to overcome the perception among some Conservatives that he is too wealthy to understand the needs of the average British citizen at a time of devastating inflation, as well as the reservations of other Conservatives who were turned off by the tax increases Sunak had imposed on corporations and national insurance in an attempt to help offset the costs of the government’s pandemic relief programs.
When the election results were revealed on September 5, Sunak received 42.6 percent of the vote, compared to 57.4 percent for Truss, who was elected party leader.
Sunak beat off a Tory rebellion in March 2023, passing the Windsor Framework, a post-Brexit agreement to regulate commerce between Northern Ireland, the rest of the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
During his effort to garner support for the measure, Sunak emphasised Northern Ireland’s “privileged access, not just to the U.K. home market, which is enormous, but also to the EU single market” under the framework.
Critics were quick to point out that, before Brexit, the entire United Kingdom could claim this “privileged access.”
Nevertheless, the European Union approved the deal, paving the way for the ultimate restoration of Northern Ireland’s devolved government (it was suspended in February 2022 when the Democratic Unionist Party launched a boycott over post-Brexit trade).
Sunak fired unpopular home secretary Suella Braverman in November 2023 as part of a larger cabinet upheaval that included former Prime Minister David Cameron’s surprising return to parliament as Foreign Secretary.
Cameron, who was promoted to the House of Lords and named Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton to take his position in the cabinet, seems an unlikely pick, given Sunak’s prior efforts to portray his government as a break with the past.
Cameron’s return to front-bench politics did little to boost Conservative fortunes, and polls of voting intentions constantly showed the Labour Party with a significant lead over the Conservatives.
As a result, Sunak’s announcement in May 2024 that a general election would be conducted in July of that year, more than six months before the legally mandated period, caught many off guard.
That campaign saw the Conservatives suffer one of the worst defeats in the party’s history, with numerous high-ranking members of Sunak’s cabinet losing seats.
Sunak hailed Keir Starmer’s resurgent Labour Party’s resounding victory as “a sobering verdict” issued by the British people, capping off 14 years of Conservative dominance.
Rishi Sunak Wife
Sunak married Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murty, in August 2009. Sunak and Murty met while attending Stanford University in the United States, and he proposed to her on a cliff near the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay. They have two kids; the first was born in 2011 and the second in 2013.
Rishi Sunak Net Worth
Rishi Sunak’s net worth is believed to range between £640 million and £730 million. His wealth is mostly derived from his wife, Akshata Murty, daughter of Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys.
The couple’s combined wealth places them among the wealthiest people in the UK, thanks to huge gains from dividends and Infosys investments.
Social Media
X: @RishiSunak
