The one-time Tory golden boy, Rishi Sunak enjoyed an astonishingly rapid ascent – but having scaled the peak of British politics he has struggled to win over his party or the country at large. As chancellor during the Covid-19 pandemic, he was the most popular politician in the UK 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. 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 an MBA from Stanford University in California and married to the daughter of India’s sixth richest man, he has however found it hard to shed the perception he is remote from the concerns of ordinary Britons. As a self-professed low-tax, small-state Tory, he has been.
