UK’s first Indian-origin PM, almost certainly headed for a poll drubbing, had a chance to make a mark. But he saw 10 Downing Street as just another job and mucked it all up
For Rishi Sunak, there is history and then there is his story. The history books will record Sunak as Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin, its youngest in 200 years and the wealthiest occupant of 10 Downing Street, far richer along with wife Akshata Murty than the country’s monarch King Charles III. But then there is his story.
Rishi’s meteoric rise | After a 20-month premiership, Sunak has called a general election for July 4, which opinion polls indicate he is on course to lose. If so, Sunak will have helped pull down the curtain on 14 years of governance by his Conservative Party, which is currently some 20 points behind in the polls to the main opposition Labour.
It would be an unusual milestone in Sunak’s customary high-flying trajectory, which a British TV interviewer once told him on air was “one of life’s success stories”. Indeed, Sunak was head boy at his expensive private school, went to Oxford and Stanford universities, had a profitable career in finance, married the daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy and entered the British parliament just seven years before his dizzying elevation to PM. Along the way, he acquired an apartment in Santa Monica, California, the sixth most expensive address in US.
Rishi’s meteoric rise | After a 20-month premiership, Sunak has called a general election for July 4, which opinion polls indicate he is on course to lose. If so, Sunak will have helped pull down the curtain on 14 years of governance by his Conservative Party, which is currently some 20 points behind in the polls to the main opposition Labour.
It would be an unusual milestone in Sunak’s customary high-flying trajectory, which a British TV interviewer once told him on air was “one of life’s success stories”. Indeed, Sunak was head boy at his expensive private school, went to Oxford and Stanford universities, had a profitable career in finance, married the daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy and entered the British parliament just seven years before his dizzying elevation to PM. Along the way, he acquired an apartment in Santa Monica, California, the sixth most expensive address in US.