Rishi Sunak is to be Britain’s youngest prime minister after he won the race, a tough task with Britain’s economic fall.
Rishi Sunak is also the first prime minister of color and he is of Indian origin. Mr Sunak is one of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster. He will be asked to form a government by King Charles, replacing Liz Truss, the outgoing leader who only lasted 44 days in the job before she resigned.
He defeated centrist politician Penny Mordaunt, who failed to get enough backing from lawmakers to enter the ballot, while his rival, the former prime minister Boris Johnson, withdrew from the contest saying he could no longer unite the party.
Mr Sunak, the 42-year-old former finance minister is to be Britain’s third prime minister in less than two months, entrusted with restoring stability to a country reeling from years of political and economic turmoil.
The multi-millionaire one-time hedge fund boss will be anticipated to launch deep spending cuts to try to rebuild Britain’s fiscal reputation, just as the country falls into a recession, intensified by the swelling costs of energy and food.
He will also inherit a political party that has fractured along ideological lines, a challenge that damaged the fortunes of several former Conservative leaders.
Britain has been locked in a state of perma-crisis ever since it voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, unleashing a battle at Westminster over the future of the country that remains unresolved to this today.
Boris Johnson, the face of the Brexit vote, led his party to a landslide victory in 2019, only to be driven out of office less than three years later after a series of scandals. His successor Liz Truss lasted just over six weeks before she quit over an economic policy that trashed the country’s economic credibility.
Economists have questioned whether Mr Sunak can tackle the country’s finances while holding the party’s multiple warring factions together.
Rishi Sunak came to nationwide attention when, aged 39, he became finance minister under Boris Johnson just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Britain, developing the successful furlough scheme.
The former Goldman Sachs analyst will be the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of Indian origin.
His family migrated to Britain in the 1960s, a period when many people from Britain’s former colonies moved to the country to help it rebuild after the Second World War.
After graduating from Oxford University, he went to Stanford University where he met his wife Akshata Murthy, whose father is Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, founder of outsourcing giant Infosys Ltd.
Britain is facing an economic crisis leaving millions of people poorer, and the task before Mr. Sunak is Herculean.