Who is Rishi Sunak?

When Rishi Sunak lost to Liz Truss in the Conservative Party’s first leadership race, few were surprised.

Many of the people who were given the opportunity to choose between the two candidates blamed Sunak for the downfall of Boris Johnson. They also preferred Truss’s “optimistic” economic policies to Sunak’s gloomy assessment of the fiscal outlook. While she promised generous tax deals, he argued that economic circumstances would be tough and taxes could not be cut anytime soon. In fact, he warned, they might even have to go up.

A few weeks later, Sunak finds himself succeeding Truss, vindicating his criticism of the former prime minister’s fiscal plans. In the end, he has been the only candidate who has won enough support to become leader of his party and therefore British Prime Minister, something that is partly due to the need to avoid another leadership contest. The Conservatives could not afford to continue projecting an image of disunity and chaos.

Johnson was briefly in the running for the job before announcing that he didn’t think it was right for him to come back now. We may never know if he really had enough candidates to run, as he claimed.

Penny Mordaunt was a more credible candidate, but an unlikely winner due to her lack of experience. Her failure to rally enough support to stand for the leadership vote cleared the way for Sunak.

Who is Rishi Sunak?

Sunak is, in many ways, a traditional conservative. He was born in Southampton and attended the Winchester School, a very expensive and respected private school. He studied at Oxford and Stanford before moving into the financial sector to work at Goldman Sachs. After graduating, he spent a few years living and working in Silicon Valley, where he met his wife Akshata Murty, daughter of NR Narayana Murty, an Indian billionaire.

Sunak did not enter Parliament until 2015, when he took the seat of Richmond, in North Yorkshire, a very conservative part of the country, succeeding the previous leader of the party, William Hague. Until 2020 he was a great unknown outside the party: a new MP making his way into Parliament, impressing people but not occupying a high position.

However, things change quickly in politics, and the resignation of Sajid Javid in February 2020 left a vacancy in the Government. Johnson gave Sunak the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of the most important posts of state in the UK. His honeymoon in the position was cut short by the arrival of covid-19. Sunak found that he not only had to deal with the financial impact of a global pandemic, but was tasked with appearing on television almost daily to update the country on his decisions.

Despite the pressure, Sunak turned the situation into a personal success. He was widely recognized and praised for the furlough scheme that saw the government pay the wages of people unable to work due to the lockdowns. Gone are the many days when Sunak was accused of dithering about whether to introduce such a plan.

Sunak’s popularity soared as Britons felt his actions saved them from the worst financial effects of the pandemic, but with the rollout of vaccines and a return to something resembling normal life, they began to wonder how the country is going. to recover financially.

This coincided with enormous problems for the Government. Johnson was found to have broken the rules of the state of alarm and was fined by the police. Sunak was also fined, but he escaped the level of criticism leveled at Johnson because people seemed to genuinely believe that Sunak had inadvertently ended up at the illegal party when he was on his way to a meeting. This was the excuse Johnson was selling at the time, but it was somehow more believable coming from Sunak, a man who seemed to have really gone out of his way to help people, rather than one who seemed to disregard the rules.

In a revealing reference to that time, Sunak has written in his first statement after winning the leadership contest that his administration will be characterized by “integrity, professionalism and responsibility at all levels.”

More damaging were revelations that Sunak’s wife was claiming non-resident tax status to pay less tax. Before this scandal, Sunak was talked about as the most obvious successor to Johnson, but the prospect of a finance minister allowing his own family to circumvent tax rules stopped his candidacy in its tracks.

The fall of Johnson, the rise of Truss

In July 2022, Javid (who had returned as Minister of Health) and Sunak resigned at about the same time, triggering a spate of new resignations from their colleagues.

The decision ultimately forced Johnson to resign and the Tories have yet to forgive or forget him, opting for Truss when given the opportunity to vote in the summer. Meanwhile, the party’s representatives in Parliament had always favored Sunak, so when Truss’s brief term came to an end, they avoided asking questions and rallied behind his preferred candidate.

Sunak has a lot of work ahead of him. The financial situation of the United Kingdom when he resigned was already bad.

Two months of inaction followed as the Conservatives decided on a new leader. Then Truss’s mini-budget tanked the economy. The global impact of the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis, rising interest rates and concerns about the UK’s financial stability mean that Sunak faces a difficult time in office.

He has to unite his party, knowing that while he was the first choice of many, some preferred other candidates, including Johnson. Meanwhile, the Labor Party is at the top of the polls and possible solutions to the economic crisis will be painful and make a difference.

How is Sunak going to lead the Conservatives to victory in the next general election, scheduled for before the end of 2024 (or early 2025 at the latest) if the electorate is feeling the effects of higher taxes, increased of the energy bill and stagnant wages?

Their only hope is to distance themselves from the more damaging aspects of the Conservative legacy – such as the current state of the NHS, industrial strikes and the chronic underfunding of public services – and associate it with the more positive aspects, such as a high level of youth employment.

Given recent events, his victory in the aftermath of Truss’s demise is hardly a surprise. Perhaps the surprise is that someone wants to be prime minister right now.

Victoria Honeyman, Associate Professor of British Politics, University of Leeds

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.