History UsefulNotes / RishiSunak

Sunak did not serve in Truss's cabinet, returning to the back benches, only for Truss's ministry to implode completely within weeks over her disastrous economic policies, with her resigning after only 49 days on 20 October to become [[ShortLivedLeadership the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom]]. In the ensuing leadership election, Sunak stood again, and once more soon became the frontrunner, and this time neither of his closest rivals (Boris Johnson, attempting a very sudden political comeback, or the Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt) attracted enough support to match him, leaving him to become leader of the Conservative Party unopposed on 24 October 2022.[[note]]In the name of expedience/preventing the Return of Boris by any means necessary, the powerful 1922 Committee (the parliamentary group of Conservative backbench [=MPs=]) drew up new rules that required candidates to be nominated by at least 100 [=MPs=] to qualify in the October leadership election. Both Johnson and Mordaunt claimed to have public and private support from at least 100 [=MPs=] each before they respectively withdrew. Realistic estimates are closer to 60 and 30 respectively.[[/note]] In addition to being the first non-White and first British Asian prime minister, he's also, at 42 years and 166 days upon taking office, the youngest prime minister since UsefulNotes/LordLiverpool in 1812,[[note]]Liverpool was appointed as PM the day after his 42nd birthday.[[/note]] and, as a Hindu, the first practitioner of a religion other than Christianity to hold the office.[[note]]UsefulNotes/BenjaminDisraeli was born and raised Jewish, but his family converted to the Church of England when he was 12 at his father's inisistance after a nasty tiff at their synagogue; UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee was agnostic if not atheist; and UsefulNotes/JamesCallaghan was raised Baptist before becoming an atheist.[[/note]] In a fitting coincidence, the day he became Conservative leader was also the first day of Diwali, one of the most important Hindu festivals.

[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/chancellor_rishi_sunak.jpg]]

Rishi Sunak (born 12 May 1980) is a British Conservative politician, the current [[UsefulNotes/TheMenOfDowningStreet Prime Minister]] of the UsefulNotes/UnitedKingdom and the [[UsefulNotes/BritishPoliticalSystem Member of Parliament]] for Richmond (Yorkshire).[[note]]This is the official name of his constituency, to avoid it being confused for the now-defunct constituency of Richmond in Surrey, as well as the extant constituency of Richmond Park in Greater London.[[/note]] Sunak is the UK's first non-White, and first British Asian,[[note]]While Sunak is the first Prime Minister of British Asian ethnicity, other previous holders of the office have had Asian ancestry, including UsefulNotes/LordLiverpool, whose great-grandmother Isabella Beizor was Indian, and UsefulNotes/BorisJohnson, whose great-grandfather was the Turkish diplomat Ali Kemal.[[/note]] Prime Minister. He is also the first prime minister to be appointed by King UsefulNotes/CharlesIII.

Born in Southampton to parents of UsefulNotes/{{India}}n descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s, Sunak was educated at the fee-paying private school Winchester College, before studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at [[UsefulNotes/{{Oxbridge}} Lincoln College, Oxford]], and later gaining an MBA from Stanford University in California as a Fulbright Scholar. While studying at Stanford, he met his wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire businessman who founded multinational technology company Infosys. With a combined fortune of £730m ($827m), Sunak and Murty are the 222nd richest people in Britain, and Sunak is most likely the richest prime minister in history.

In the 2015 election, Sunak entered Parliament through the safe seat of Richmond, which has been consistently represented by Conservative Party [=MPs=] since ''1910''.[[note]]The constituency's previous MP, who retired in 2015, was William Hague, who had led the Conservatives in opposition from 1997 to 2001 and held cabinet positions under UsefulNotes/JohnMajor and UsefulNotes/DavidCameron.[[/note]] In the 2016 referendum on continued British membership of the European Union, Sunak supported the Leave campaign, in contrast to his immediate predecessor (who campaigned quite strongly for Remain but subsequently claimed to have become a "convert" to the Brexit cause). In 2018, Prime Minister UsefulNotes/TheresaMay appointed him to his first ministerial position, as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government.

In the 2019 Conservative leadership campaign occasioned by May's resignation, Sunak supported UsefulNotes/BorisJohnson. After Johnson won, he appointed Sunak to be Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Later, after Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid resigned as such in February 2020, Sunak was promoted to replace him. Between Sunak taking office and his first budget in March 2020, the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic had gotten into full swing, with Sunak's time as Chancellor being largely defined by two key initiatives intended to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. The first was the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, a furlough scheme intended to avoid mass redundancies and unemployment as a result of the pandemic's impact on business, which ran from March 2020 through to September 2021. The second was "Eat Out to Help Out", in which the UK Government subsidised food and non-alcoholic drinks at participating cafés, pubs, and restaurants at 50%, up to £10 per person (per order), throughout August 2020, in a drive intended to help the hospitality industry struggling under the weight of COVID-19 restrictions. While furlough was largely regarded positively, Eat Out to Help Out was more controversial, especially after [[https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 researchers showed that the scheme had caused COVID-19 cases to rise]]. The following inquiry revealed, among other things, that this had led the government's scientific advisers to dub him 'Doctor Death'.

On 5 July 2022, Sunak resigned as Chancellor, the second major government minister to resign that day following Javid, his predecessor as Chancellor, who was now Health Secretary, as a result of Boris Johnson's handling of the Chris Pincher scandal.[[note]]Johnson had appointed Pincher to a government post despite knowing that he had been the subject of (and investigated by the police over) multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, which had come to light after Pincher was involved in another sexual misconduct incident earlier that week.[[/note]] Javid and Sunak became the first of ultimately 62 Government ministers who resigned, forcing Johnson himself to resign on 7 July. Sunak appeared to be the early favourite to replace him in the subsequent leadership election, winning every preliminary ballot of Conservative [=MPs=], but turned out to be widely disliked among the party members outside Parliament, who blamed him for instigating Johnson's fall. Thus, he lost to UsefulNotes/LizTruss in the final ballot.

Sunak did not serve in Truss's cabinet, returning to the backbenches, only for Truss's ministry to implode completely within weeks over her disastrous economic policies, with her resigning after only 49 days on 20 October to become [[ShortLivedLeadership the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom]]. In the ensuing leadership election, Sunak stood once again, and once more very quickly became the frontrunner, and this time neither of his closest rivals (Boris Johnson, attempting a very sudden political comeback, or the Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt) attracted enough support to match him, leaving him to become leader of the Conservative Party unopposed on 24 October 2022.[[note]]In the name of expedience/preventing the Return of the Boris by any means necessary, the powerful 1922 committee drew up new rules that required candidates to be nominated by at least 100 [=MPs=] to qualify in the October leadership election. Both Johnson and Mordaunt claimed to have public and private support from at least 100 [=MPs=] each before they respectively withdrew - realistic estimates are closer to 60 and 30 respectively.[[/note]] In addition to being the first non-White and first British Asian prime minister, he's also, at 42 years and 166 days upon taking office, the youngest prime minister since UsefulNotes/LordLiverpool in 1812,[[note]]Liverpool was appointed as PM the day after his 42nd birthday.[[/note]] and, as a Hindu, the first practitioner of a religion other than Christianity to hold the office.[[note]]UsefulNotes/BenjaminDisraeli was born and raised Jewish, but his family converted to the Church of England when he was 12 at his father's inisistance after a nasty tiff at their synagogue; UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee was agnostic if not atheist; and UsefulNotes/JamesCallaghan was raised Baptist before becoming an atheist.[[/note]] In a fitting coincidence, the day he became Conservative leader was also the first day of Diwali, one of the most important Hindu festivals.

* He is one of the recurring characters of the impression-based sketch show ''Series/DeadRingers''.

In the 2019 Conservative leadership campaign occasioned by May's resignation, Sunak supported UsefulNotes/BorisJohnson. After Johnson won, he appointed Sunak to be Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Later, after Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid resigned as such in February 2020, Sunak was promoted to replace him. Between Sunak taking office and his first budget in March 2020, the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic had gotten into full swing, with Sunak's time as Chancellor being largely defined by two key initiatives intended to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. The first was the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, a furlough scheme intended to avoid mass redundancies and unemployment as a result of the pandemic's impact on business, which ran from March 2020 through to September 2021. The second was "Eat Out to Help Out", in which the UK Government subsidised food and non-alcoholic drinks at participating cafés, pubs, and restaurants at 50%, up to £10 per person (per order), throughout August 2020, in a drive intended to help the hospitality industry struggling under the weight of COVID-19 restrictions. While furlough was largely regarded positively, Eat Out to Help Out was more controversial, especially after [[https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 researchers showed that the scheme had caused COVID-19 cases to rise]].

Sunak did not serve in Truss's cabinet, returning to the backbenches, only for Truss's ministry to implode completely within weeks over her disastrous economic policies, with her resigning after only 49 days on 20 October to become [[ShortLivedLeadership the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom]]. In the ensuing leadership election, Sunak stood once again, and once more very quickly became the frontrunner, and this time neither of his closest rivals (Boris Johnson, attempting a very sudden political comeback, or the Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt) attracted enough support to match him, leaving him to become leader of the Conservative Party unopposed on 24 October 2022.[[note]]In the name of expedience, the party required candidates to be nominated by at least 100 [=MPs=] to qualify in the October leadership election. Both Johnson and Mordaunt claimed to have public and private support from at least 100 [=MPs=] each before they respectively withdrew.[[/note]] In addition to being the first non-White and first British Asian prime minister, he's also, at 42 years and 166 days upon taking office, the youngest prime minister since UsefulNotes/LordLiverpool in 1812,[[note]]Liverpool was appointed as PM the day after his 42nd birthday.[[/note]] and, as a Hindu, the first practitioner of a religion other than Christianity to hold the office.[[note]]UsefulNotes/BenjaminDisraeli was born and raised Jewish, but his family converted to the Church of England when he was 12 at his father's inisistance after a nasty tiff at their synagogue; UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee was agnostic if not atheist; and UsefulNotes/JamesCallaghan was raised Baptist before becoming an atheist.[[/note]] In a fitting coincidence, the day he became Conservative leader was also the first day of Diwali, one of the most important Hindu festivals.

Sunak did not serve in Truss's cabinet, returning to the backbenches, only for Truss's ministry to implode completely within weeks over her disastrous economic policies, with her resigning after only 49 days on 20 October to become [[ShortLivedLeadership the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom]]. In the ensuing leadership election, Sunak stood once again, and once more very quickly became the frontrunner, and this time neither of his closest rivals (Boris Johnson, attempting a very sudden political comeback, or the Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt) attracted enough support to match him, leaving him to become leader of the Conservative Party unopposed on 24 October 2022.[[note]]In the name of expedience, the party required candidates to be nominated by at least 100 [=MPs=] to qualify in the October leadership election. Both Johnson and Mordaunt claimed to have public and private support from at least 100 [=MPs=] each before they respectively withdrew.[[/note]] In addition to being the first non-White and first British Asian prime minister, he's also, at 42 years and 166 days upon taking office, the youngest prime minister since UsefulNotes/LordLiverpool in 1812,[[note]]Liverpool was appointed as PM the day after his 42nd birthday.[[/note]] and, as a Hindu, the first practitioner of a religion other than Christianity to hold the office.[[note]]UsefulNotes/BenjaminDisraeli was born and raised Jewish but converted to the Church of England as a young man, UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee was agnostic if not atheist, and UsefulNotes/JamesCallaghan was raised Baptist before becoming an atheist.[[/note]] In a fitting coincidence, the day he became Conservative leader was also the first day of Diwali, one of the most important Hindu festivals.

Sunak did not serve in Truss's cabinet, returning to the backbenches, only for Truss's ministry to implode completely within weeks over her disastrous economic policies, with her resigning after only 45 days on 20 October to become [[ShortLivedLeadership the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom]]. In the ensuing leadership election, Sunak stood once again, and once more very quickly became the frontrunner, and this time neither of his closest rivals (Boris Johnson, attempting a very sudden political comeback, or the Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt) attracted enough support to match him, leaving him to become leader of the Conservative Party unopposed on 24 October 2022.[[note]]In the name of expedience, the party required candidates to be nominated by at least 100 [=MPs=] to qualify in the October leadership election. Both Johnson and Mordaunt claimed to have public and private support from at least 100 [=MPs=] each before they respectively withdrew.[[/note]] In addition to being the first non-White and first British Asian prime minister, he's also, at 42 years and 166 days upon taking office, the youngest prime minister since UsefulNotes/LordLiverpool in 1812,[[note]]Liverpool was appointed as PM the day after his 42nd birthday.[[/note]] and, as a Hindu, the first practitioner of a religion other than Christianity to hold the office.[[note]]UsefulNotes/BenjaminDisraeli was born and raised Jewish but converted to the Church of England as a young man, UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee was agnostic if not atheist, and UsefulNotes/JamesCallaghan was raised Baptist before becoming an atheist.[[/note]] In a fitting coincidence, the day he became Conservative leader was also the first day of Diwali, one of the most important Hindu festivals.

[[quoteright:194:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/sunakportrait.png]]
[[caption-width-right:194:[[Series/SpittingImage Vote for Dishy Rishi!]]]]

[[caption-width-right:300:[[Series/SpittingImage Vote for Dishy Rishi!]]]]

Sunak did not serve in Truss's cabinet, returning to the backbenches, only for Truss's ministry to implode completely within weeks over her disastrous economic policies, with her resigning after only 45 days on 20 October to become [[ShortLivedLeadership the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom]]. In the ensuing leadership election, Sunak stood once again, and once more very quickly became the frontrunner, and this time neither of his closest rivals (Boris Johnson, attempting a very sudden political comeback, or the Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt) attracted enough support to match him, leaving him to become leader of the Conservative Party unopposed on 24 October 2022.[[note]]In the name of expedience, the party required candidates to be nominated by at least 100 [=MPs=] to qualify in the October leadership election. Both Johnson and Mordaunt claimed to have public and private support from at least 100 [=MPs=] each before they respectively withdrew.[[/note]] In addition to being the first non-White and first British Asian prime minister, he's also, at 42 years and 166 days upon taking office, the youngest prime minister since UsefulNotes/LordLiverpool in 1812,[[note]]Liverpool was appointed as PM the day after his 42nd birthday.[[/note]] and, as a Hindu, the first practitioner of a religion other than Christianity to hold the office.[[note]]UsefulNotes/BenjaminDisraeli was born and raised Jewish but converted to the Church of England as a young man, and UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee was agnostic if not atheist.[[/note]] In a fitting coincidence, the day he became Conservative leader was also the first day of Diwali, one of the most important Hindu festivals.