AMN / WEB DESK
Former British Finance Minister Rishi Sunak is set to become Britain’s next Prime Minister after Penny Mordaunt dropped out of the Tory leadership race. Mordaunt said Sunak has her full support. There were loud cheers and bangs on the tables from Conservative Members of Parliament as Sir Graham Brady announced they only received one nomination for the new leader of the party. He therefore declared Rishi Sunak to be the next party leader.
Sunak will become the UK’s first British Asian Prime Minister. Forty-two-year-old Sunak becomes the Britain’s third Prime Minister in less than two months as Boris Joshnson and Liz Truss have resigned from their posts.
Profile of the new British Prime Minister.
Born in Southampton on 12 May 1980, to parents of Indian descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s, Rishi Sunak has served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022. He previously served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2020. A member of the Conservative Party, Sunak has been the Member of Parliament for Richmond since 2015. He supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on EU membership.
Sunak studied at Lincoln College, Oxford. He got an MBA from Stanford University in California as a Fulbright Scholar. Sunak is one of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster with with a combined fortune of 730 millon pounds with the assests of his wife Akshata Murty . As Chancellor, Sunak was prominent in the government’s financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact, including the Coronavirus Job Retention and Eat Out to Help Out schemes. He resigned as the chancellor on 5 July 2022, citing his economic policy differences with Johnson in his resignation letter. On 8 July this year, he stood in the Conservative party leadership election to replace Johnson. He in turn lost the Conservative leadership race to Liz Truss. After serving at various financial institutions, Sunak was selected as the Conservative candidate for Richmond (Yorks) in October 2014.