The Conservative Party on Monday elected Rishi Sunak as its new leader.
He will be named the new UK Prime Minister, the party announced in a tweet on Monday.
Here are 18 things to know about Rishi Sunak:
- Rishi Sunak was Born in Southampton on May 12, 1980. He is 42 years old so this makes him Britain’s Youngest Prime Minister.
- He is of Indian descent.
- His Indian parents migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s.
- He is a member of the Conservative Party and has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Richmond (Yorks) since 2015.
- He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022 and Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2020.
- Sunak attended 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 wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire businessman who founded Infosys.
- Sunak and his wife are the 222nd richest people in Britain with a combined fortune of £730m as of 2022.
- 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.
- He resigned as chancellor on 5 July 2022, citing his economic policy differences with Johnson in his resignation letter.
- Sunak’s resignation, along with the resignation of Javid as Health Secretary, led to Johnson’s resignation amid a government crisis