Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Oct 25: Following Penny Mordaunt’s withdrawal from the race on Monday, Rishi Sunak, who likes to refer to himself as a proud Hindu, is going to be elected as the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of Indian descent.
Earlier, Liz Truss, the prime minister, narrowly defeated Sunak for the position of prime minister. In the past six years, Rishi Sunak will be the fifth prime minister of the UK.
Sunak, a conservative party leader who was born on May 12, 1980, in Southampton, England, has been involved in politics since 2010. Sunak, a Richmond resident, won the UK general election in 2015.
During the second term of British Prime Minister Theresa May, the 42-year-old worked as the Parliament’s Under-Secretary.
For two years, from 2015 to 2017, Rishi Sunak served as a parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy and a member of the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs Select Committee. Later, in 2019, he worked as the Treasury Chief Secretary for the Boris Johnson administration.
In 2020, Sunak received a promotion to Chancellor of the Exchequer, regarded as Britain’s second-most crucial position. But after the ‘partygate’ controversy, which involved violating Covid laws and planning lockdown parties at government buildings, his reputation suffered and he was one of the officials penalised by the London Police. Sunak was forced to leave his position as a result of the controversy.
The fact that Sunak’s rich wife is a non-domiciled taxpayer has also drawn criticism. The tax status enables someone who was born abroad or whose father is from abroad to pay tax in the UK only on their income earned in the UK. He is married to Infosys chief Narayana Murthy’s daughter Akshata Murty.
Sunak attended Winchester College, which, oddly enough, has produced nearly six chancellors of the Exchequer. Later, he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Lincoln College, a university of Oxford affiliate.
Sunak’s parents relocated from Africa to Southampton in southern England, while his grandparents, who were originally from Punjab, had moved to East Africa. His mother was a pharmacist, while his father was a general practitioner for the National Health Service.