Rishi Sunak was on Monday elected the Conservative Party’s new leader. He will be named the new UK Prime Minister, the party announced in a tweet on Monday.
Here are 18 things to know about Rishi Sunak
1. Rishi Sunak was Born in Southampton on May 12, 1980
2. He is of Indian descent.
3. His Indian parents migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s.
4. He is a member of the Conservative Party and has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Richmond (Yorks) since 2015.
5. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022 and Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2020.
6. Sunak attended Winchester College. He subsequently read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Lincoln College, Oxford, and later gained an MBA from Stanford University in California as a Fulbright Scholar.
7. While studying at Stanford, He met his wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire businessman who founded Infosys.
- Sunak and his wife are the 222nd richest people in Britain with a combined fortune of £730m as of 2022.
- Sunak was elected to the House of Commons for Richmond in North Yorkshire at the 2015 general election, succeeding William Hague.
11. Sunak supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on EU membership.
- He was appointed to Theresa May‘s second government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government in the 2018 reshuffle.
- He voted three times in favour of May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement.
- After May resigned, Sunak supported Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Conservative leader.
- After Johnson was elected and appointed Prime Minister, he appointed Sunak as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
- Sunak replaced Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer after his resignation in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle.
- He resigned as chancellor on 5 July 2022, citing his economic policy differences with Johnson in his resignation letter.
- Sunak’s resignation, along with the resignation of Javid as Health Secretary, led to Johnson’s resignation amid a government crisis
