Rishi Sunak Wins Contest to be UK’s Next PM and Confront Economic Storm
LONDON – Rishi Sunak won a tumultuous three-day race to lead Britain’s Conservative Party on Monday, a remarkable political comeback that has doubled as a historic milestone history, making him the first black person to become prime minister in British history.
The 42-year-old son of Indian immigrants, whose political career has had its ups and downs, Mr. Sunak won the election to replace the short-lived prime minister, Liz Truss, as the only rival. His remaining, Penny Mordaunt, withdrew. after failing to meet the threshold of 100 nominations from Conservative lawmakers.
Mr Sunak, the former Exchequer chancellor, is expected to pull Britain back to more orthodoxy after Ms Truss’ failed experiment in trickle-down economics, which rattled markets. finance and severely damaged the fiscal reputation of the UK. He can also offer a stark contrast to the pompous style and erratic behavior of Boris Johnson, his former boss and Ms Truss’ discredited predecessor.
But Mr Sunak will confront Britain’s most severe economic crisis in a generation, and he will do so with the leadership of a Conservative Party deeply fractured. Healing rifts within the party, and leading the country through economic turbulence in the months to come, will require political skills at least as proficient as those that have helped Mr. Sunak navigate his life. leadership contest.
Mr Johnson’s decision to pull out of the race on Sunday night cleared the way for Mr Sunak, who challenged Ms Truss last summer but lost to her in a vote of party ranks. With Mr. Sunak being the only surviving candidate this time around, he was not subject to another vote by members.
It was a reeling fortunes reversal for Mr Sunak, whose abrupt resignation from Mr Johnson’s cabinet last July sent Mr Johnson down and plunged Britain into a turmoil, which culminated in Mr. Mrs. Truss’s calamitous brief time. After he lost to her in the leadership contest, it seems that Mr. Sunak’s great promotion was also successful.
He will now become Britain’s third prime minister in seven weeks, the youngest in two centuries and the first Hindu to achieve the highest elected office.
A former investment banker whose wife is the daughter of an Indian tech billionaire, Mr Sunak would also be one of the richest people ever to occupy No. 10 Downing Street – which could prove flawed as Britons are struggling to pay for rising gas bills. receipt. The Times of London this year estimate the value of the couple over $800 million, placing them among the 250 wealthiest people or families in the UK.
But if his victory sweeps another hurdle in British politics – putting Mr Sunak in the same category as Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, and Benjamin Disraeli, the only prime minister of Jewish heritage – then that also pushed him to power at a particularly difficult moment.
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“There is no doubt that we face profound economic challenges,” said Mr. Sunak briefly, somewhat stiffly, after his victory. “We need stability and unity now, and I will make it my top priority to bring my party and country together.”
Britain is suffering from two pains from soaring energy prices and an economic downturn, as well as self-inflicted damage to Ms. Truss’ free-market program: unfinished tax cuts that have spooked markets. fear, puts the pound in a straitjacket, and starts a rebellion of her own legislators.
The dramatic circumstances of Mr. Sunak’s rise have reinforced the problems he will face in unifying a divided party. If Ms Mordaunt wins the required 100 votes from lawmakers, polls suggest she will have a good chance of defeating him with members, as Ms. Truss did.
Her failed challenge and Mr Johnson’s bid left a party still torn by factions. Some members continued to see Mr Sunak as Mr Johnson’s political assassin, and the mass scandals during Mr Johnson’s tenure, following Ms Truss’ economic debacle, boosted the Tories’ popularity. become bad.
It now loses more than 30 percentage points to the opposition Labor Party in several opinion polls. Labor leader Keir Starmer has demanded a general election and those calls could grow louder as the new prime minister adopts a program of economic tightening amid the cost of living crisis.
However, political analysts say the party’s swift end to the leadership contest, which avoided a vote of its members, suggests that the Tory’s hostile factions are committed for now. gathered around Mr. Sunak. In her withdrawal statement, Ms Mordaunt urged people to support her opponent.
“After the trauma of the last four or five months, even the factions that are not in favor of Sunak will give him a fair shot,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “They have to decide if they want to win another election or spend some time out of government fighting each other.”
British wealth and the pound soared on news of Mr Sunak’s win, stoking hopes that his financial prudence and more technocratic management style will deal with investors. after the chaos caused by Mrs. Truss.
As a candidate, Mr. Sunak warned that her plan to cut taxes at a time of double-digit inflation would be destabilizing. He called for the corporate tax hike to remain unchanged and the income tax cut to be stopped, both of which Mr. Sunak had proposed when he was prime minister. “Borrowing money to get out of inflation is not a plan,” he said during a debate in July, “it’s a fairy tale.”
Mr. Sunak said almost nothing about his plans in this more compressed race. But he is expected to pay attention to the agenda he laid out during last summer’s campaign, which emphasized the need to rein in inflation before lowering taxes. With British borrowing increasing as a result of Ms Truss’ policies, he may be forced to cut spending deeper than he ever expected.
Some analysts expect him to retain Jeremy Hunt, the prime minister Ms Truss recruited after she was forced to remove the first, Kwasi Kwarteng, the architect of market-destabilizing tax cuts. school. Mr. Hunt has reversed virtually all of Ms. Truss’s tax cuts, pursuing ideas similar to Mr. Sunak’s.
“The pressure on him is to run the most stable, accountable and effective government possible in terms of people,” Professor Travers said. “How financial markets will react will be the big test for this government.”
The man chosen to face all these challenges was born in Southampton, on the south coast of England, as Indian immigrants from East Africa to England. His father is a family doctor; His mother runs a pharmacy. They saved up to send him to Winchester College, one of Britain’s most academically rigorous high schools, and then to Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics.
From there, Mr. Sunak worked at Goldman Sachs and a hedge fund, and later earned an MBA at Stanford University, where he met his wife, Akshata Murty. Her father is Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, who has a fortune Forbes magazine estimates 4.5 billion USD.
Mr Sunak joined Parliament in 2015, rapidly rising to become prime minister in 2020, where he has won instant popularity for handing out billions of pounds to protect those who have lost their jobs in the past year. coronavirus pandemic.
However, his career was nearly derailed by reports that Mrs Murty had a privileged tax status that allowed her to avoid paying millions of dollars in British taxes on some of her earnings. It also emerged that he was holding a US green card, which would allow him to permanently reside in the US.
Mr Sunak gave up her green card and Mrs Murty changed her tax status, but the damage has been done. Although he survived the episode, it left him with lingering trauma at a difficult economic time for millions of Britons.
Critics often see him as a jet-setter, out of touch with ordinary people’s lives. It didn’t help that he and Miss Murty owned expensive houses in London, in his parliament in Yorkshire and in Santa Monica, California. uses a $200 “smart” cup that keeps the coffee at the correct temperature.
Anand Menon, professor of European politics at Kings College London, said: “It will depend on what people see him doing. “He would be vulnerable if he was seen as protecting the privileged and the rich.”
Prof Menon said Mr Sunak’s race carried no more element in the UK than it did for an equivalent political figure in the US. First, he was elected by Conservative lawmakers rather than in a popular vote. While critics speculated that his Indian heritage may have influenced him with some party members last summer, his wealth was seen as a bigger issue. .
“It’s not like we’re living in some kind of post-racial nirvana,” said Professor Menon. “We just do it a little differently than we do in the United States.”
On the streets of London, people reacted cautiously, perhaps reflecting weariness after months of turmoil in British politics.
Hazel Wallace, 26, who works in an ice cream parlor and sees cost of living as the biggest issue. “It’s the survival of the fittest right now, what with things is increasing.”
But David Smith, 69, a retired painter and decorator sipping a pint at the Bishop Blaize pub in Leyburn, said he was relieved Mr Sunak had replaced Ms. Truss. “He warned the whole team that things weren’t going to be okay for her and no one was listening to him,” Mr Smith said, adding that he expected Mr Sunak to do “a great job”.
Saskia Solomon contribution report.