Who is Rishi Sunak, UK’s new Prime Minister? 15 Quick facts

Rishi Sunak was named the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on Monday afternoon after his challenger, Penny Mordaunt pulled out of the race.

He has been confirmed the new Conservative Leader. He will take over from Liz Truss who resigned from the position last Thursday in just 44 days in office after a disastrous performance impeding on UK’s economy.

Who is Rishi Sunak? Here are 15 quick facts about him.

1. He will become the UK’s first British-Asian PM and at 42, the youngest in more than a century. He was born on 12 May, 1980.

2. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022 and Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2020.

3. Sunak has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Richmond (Yorks) since 2015.

4. He was born in Southampton to parents of Indian descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s.

5. 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.

6. He is married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire businessman who founded Infosys.

7. Sunak and Murty are the 222nd richest people in Britain, with a combined fortune of £730m as of 2022.

8. Sunak supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on EU membership. He voted three times in favour of May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement.

9. He was appointed to Theresa May’s second government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government in the 2018 reshuffle.

10. After May resigned, Sunak supported Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Conservative leader.

11. After Johnson was elected and appointed Prime Minister, he appointed Sunak as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

12. Sunak replaced Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer after his resignation in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle.

13. He resigned as chancellor on 5 July, 2022, citing his economic policy differences with Johnson in his resignation letter.

14. In July 2022, he stood in the Conservative party leadership election to replace Johnson and lost the members’ vote to Liz Truss.

15. Following Truss’ resignation amid a government crisis, Sunak won the October 2022 Conservative Party leadership election.

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