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Rishi Sunak to become Britain's next prime minister

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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Rishi Sunak has won the race to be leader of the Conservative Party and will become Britain's next prime minister — the third this year.

The former Treasury chief will be Britain's first leader of color, and faces the task of stabilizing the party and country at a time of economic and political turbulence.

His only rival, Penny Mordaunt, conceded and withdrew on Monday.
As leader of the governing party, he will take over as prime minister from Liz Truss, who quit last week after 45 tumultuous days in office.

 
Rishi Sunak (/ˈrɪʃiː ˈsuːnæk/; born 12 May 1980)[1] is a British politician who is Leader of the Conservative Party and due to be appointed Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Sunak served as The Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022, having previously served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2020.[2] A member of the Conservative Party, he has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Richmond (Yorks) since 2015.

Born in Southampton to parents of Indian descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s,[3] Sunak was educated at Winchester College. He subsequently read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Lincoln College, Oxford, and later gained an MBA from Stanford University in California as a Fulbright Scholar. While studying at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire businessman who founded Infosys. Sunak and Murty are the 222nd richest people in Britain, with a combined fortune of £730m as of 2022.[4] After graduating, he worked for Goldman Sachs and later as a partner at the hedge fund firms the Children's Investment Fund Management and Theleme Partners.

Sunak was elected to the House of Commons for Richmond in North Yorkshire at the 2015 general election, succeeding William Hague. Sunak supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on EU membership. He was appointed to Theresa May's second government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government in the 2018 reshuffle. He voted three times in favour of May's Brexit withdrawal agreement. After May resigned, Sunak supported Boris Johnson's campaign to become Conservative leader. After Johnson was elected and appointed Prime Minister, he appointed Sunak as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Sunak replaced Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer after his resignation in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle.

 
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