Former UK chancellor Rishi Sunak has become the United Kingdom’s third prime minister in seven weeks after his rival Penny Mordaunt withdrew from the Conservative Party leadership contention.
Sunak becomes PM during a period so fractious it has required Wikipedia to put together a disambiguation page for the phrase “2022 United Kingdom government crisis”, and with the Tories lagging more than 30 percentage points behind the Labour Party in the polls.
Apart from the fact that he’s just accepted a chalice so poisoned it’s visibly eroding, here’s a handful of things to know about Rishi Sunak:
A series of firsts
As we’ve noted before, the UK Conservative Party may be packed with climate-change deniers who are stunningly cold-blooded towards refugees, but it’s a very diverse bunch of climate-change deniers who are stunningly cold-blooded towards refugees. Sunak becomes the first person of colour, the first person of South Asian descent and the first Hindu to become British prime minister.
Wealth
Sunak is also arguably the richest prime minister the UK has ever had. His wife is Akshata Murty, daughter of N R Narayana Murthy, a founder of multinational IT company Infosys. The stake Murty holds in the company makes her one of the wealthiest women in Britain — though not necessarily for tax purposes. It’s estimated that until a media storm earlier this year forced a change in approach, her use of non-domiciled status denied the UK Treasury (which Sunak was at the time in charge of) roughly 20 million pounds over a decade.
Around the same time it was revealed Sunak had held a US green card while serving as Britain’s finance minister. The pair have a collective wealth of £730 million (A$1.3 billion).
Popularity
Early in the COVID crisis, Sunak oversaw, among other things, a £330 billion emergency support fund for businesses aimed at avoiding mass redundancies and bankruptcies. During this time he earned the nickname “Dishy Rishi“, and according to The New Statesman achieved “better ratings than any politician since the heydays of Tony Blair” and the highest approval rating for a chancellor since Denis Healey in 1978.
Then came “partygate” — Sunak was one of 82 people fined for breaching COVID restrictions — along with the revelations about the Sunak household’s financial management and his resignation from the Johnson cabinet. His popularity plummeted.
He now becomes the leader of a shambolic and profoundly divided party and a weary and scandal-jaded country in the middle of raging economic turmoil. It is little wonder he is so far resisting Labour’s calls for an early election.
UPDATE: A previous version of this article referred to Sunak as the first “non-Christian” prime minister of the United Kingdom. A few people have gotten in contact with us to say this ignores Benjamin Disraeli, who was prime minister twice, for just under 10 months in 1868 and then again between 1874 and 1880, and was of Jewish heritage.
While Disraeli’s father left Judaism and converted his children to Anglicanism when Disraeli was 12, the fact alone that Disraeli couldn’t have entered Parliament had he maintained his Jewish faith made it flip to declare there had been no non-Christians hold the office of prime minister. The assertion also ignored PMs such as Clement Attlee, James Callaghan and Neville Chamberlain who — openly or otherwise — professed to have no religious faith.
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No summary of Sunak’s record should omit his contribution to spreading Covid when he was chancellor. He gave UK residents vouchers to subsidise eating out, with predictable consequences for infection rates.
“THE UK Government’s flagship Eat Out to Help Out scheme may have caused a rise in coronavirus infections of up to 17%, new research has suggested. Dr Thiemo Fetzer, a researcher at the CAGE Research Centre at the University of Warwick, has said that Rishi Sunak’s £522 million idea caused a significant rise in new Covid cases in late summer and accelerated the pandemic into its second wave.”
But that’s far less significant than Sunak’s policies for tax-dodging and leaving the UK government incapable of funding anything or providing any services; the NHS, the police, the courts and state schools are already in a state of collapse and it will only get worse. He has personally embarked on creating several so-called “free ports” in the UK that will operate without any customs or excise duties and beyond the reach of normal law enforcement. They are self-regulating, using their own private security and regulatory systems regardless of any conflict of interest between that and maximising profits. There is already evidence of criminal involvement. Each free port will provide huge opportunities for smuggling, people-trafficking and money laundering. The free ports are owned and operated by individuals who have close links to the Tories and who took advantage of very lucrative sweet-heart deals on the land and associated developments for enormous profit even before the free ports are fully operational. This is just part of a bigger picture of the UK facilitating international crime, financial and other varieties, which has been going on for many years.
Errrr, Benjamin Disraeli was Jewish, and Prime Minister under Queen Victoria. So, Sunak is not the first non-Christian PM.
Indeed he was born Jewish, and the anti-semitic prejudices and bigotry of some sections in British society were on full display against him during his time in office. But he converted to Anglicanism, so the article is right after all.
Also Boris Johnson, like his Australian twin, is a practising Solipsist.
When you’ve said “…. I have friends who are, you know, working class …. well not working class” you’ve said it all.
I think you might find that Disraeli was the first non-christian PM
Open mind needed to salvage UK. Doesn’t matter if he is of Indian origin. He is now UK citizen and let him fix the economy and Brexit.
There have been many “non christian” P M’s of the U K. Disraeli’s family became christian, by his father in protest, while he was young, and he remained a christian.
The next in a series of complete idiots.
Are they? They seem to be doing just fine for themselves, particularly the seriously wealthy like Sunak who profit enormously in the anarchy they create. It’s the rest of us, who put up with it, or even vote for them, that are the real idiots.
You’re right. We see them as failing at their jobs and unable to run a country anywhere other than into the ground. But of course they have no intention of governing, in fact they are completely opposed to the concept of government.
Sunak will successfully manage to do what his supporters wish him to do – funnel money from taxpayers to billionaires and their corporations.
He will also get a prime minister’s pension