As chancellor during the Covid-19 pandemic, he was credited with saving millions of jobs through an unprecedented furlough scheme. Slick and image-conscious from the start – in part a legacy of time spent in the US – his well-tailored suits, fashionable accessories and love of expensive gadgetry have proved a regular source of media fascination. When he entered No 10 – at the second attempt – he brought some welcome stability after the chaos of Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership.
The respite was however brief as he grappled with a toxic inheritance of squeezed living standards, over-stretched public services and a Conservative Party still at war with itself in the aftermath of Brexit. For some in the party, his role in the downfall of Boris Johnson while the persistently high levels of taxation have led to that he was not really a Conservative at all. As Britain’s first prime minister of South Asian heritage, Mr Sunak’s rise appeared both as a testament to the classic immigrant virtues of hard work and industry as well as evidence of the way the Tories and the wider country had changed.
A multimillionaire former hedge fund manager with and married to the daughter of , he has however found it hard to shed . As a self-professed low-tax, small-state Tory, he has been described as both a non-ideological pragmatist and the most right-wing premier since Margaret Thatcher. By nature a technocrat, from his background in business he brought an analytical, problem-solvin.
