The UK Tories have elected a new leader, Rishi Sunak, who will be Britain's third PM in less than 60 days and the first non-white PM in British history.
Rishi Sunak’s campaign had a simple slogan when he ran for prime minister of Britain earlier this year: “Ready for Rishi.”
The answer was: No, sorry.
He competed against Liz Truss to lead Britain’s Conservative Party after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his scandal-induced resignation in July.
With Truss out, it appears Britain’s Conservatives are indeed ready for Sunak — or at least any chance of a reprieve from the chaos at 10 Downing Street.
Sunak won the Conservative Party’s leadership contest Monday, making him the country’s third leader in less than two months and Britain’s first prime minister of South Asian descent.
The 42-year-old former finance minister is one of Britain’s wealthiest politicians. He was born in Southampton, England, to parents of Indian origin who had emigrated from East Africa.
Educated at one of Britain’s most prestigious private schools, as was his former boss Boris Johnson, he has a glittering résumé, with degrees from the University of Oxford and Stanford University and a stint at the Goldman Sachs investment bank. Sunak is married to the Indian tech heiress Akshata Murty, whose tax affairs caused the former finance minister some political discomfort during his leadership campaign in the summer.
A video clip from a 2007 BBC documentary, in which Sunak suggests he doesn’t have any “working-class friends,” is recirculating online as some Britons frown upon the array of upper-class Conservative contenders.
Nonetheless, he remains popular among politicians of his own party, although he fares less well among the Conservative Party’s national membership, who favored Truss in September by 57.4 percent to 42.6 percent.
This is the guy that lost to Liz Truss., and by 15 points, because he was literally a Goldman Sachs economist married to a tech millionaire in an era of unprecedented austerity in post-Brexit Britain.
It'll be a miracle if he makes it to the end of the year as PM still.
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