Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak: The Technocrat Who Ran Out of Road

On 13 February 2020 an MP of not quite five years' standing walked into the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his predecessor having resigned that morning. Within weeks the country shut down and Sunak committed roughly £330 billion to keeping it solvent, including a furlough scheme that would run until September 2021. By June his approval rating was around 70 percent. Four years later he led the Conservative Party to the worst defeat in its history.

Southampton, Winchester, Stanford

Sunak was born in Southampton on 12 May 1980, the grandson of Indians who had emigrated to East Africa: his father was born in Kenya, his mother in Tanzania, and both came to England in the 1960s. His father worked as a general practitioner and his mother ran her own pharmacy, a detail he would deploy in almost every subsequent speech about aspiration. He went to Stroud School and then Winchester College, where he edited the student newspaper, read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, taking first-class honours in 2001, and completed an MBA at Stanford in 2006 as a Fulbright scholar.

Goldman, Hedge Funds and a Safe Seat

He was an analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2001 to 2004 and then moved into hedge funds, becoming a director at one in 2013. At Stanford he had met Akshata Murty, daughter of the founder of Infosys; they married in Bengaluru in 2009 and have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka. He surfaced in Conservative politics through the think tank Policy Exchange, where he led the Black and Minority Ethnic Research Unit in 2014, and that year was selected for Richmond in North Yorkshire, one of the safest seats in England and lately William Hague's. He took it in 2015 with 51 percent of the vote and backed Leave in 2016 while the government campaigned the other way.

Chancellor in a Pandemic

The ascent that followed was almost absurdly fast: local government minister in 2018, Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2019, and Chancellor in February 2020 when Sajid Javid resigned rather than accept Downing Street's control of his advisers. As one account puts it, he went from new MP to the second highest office in the land within five years.

Then the pandemic arrived and handed a former hedge fund director the largest peacetime intervention in British economic history. The furlough scheme, income support for the self-employed, loan guarantees and grants were designed and launched in weeks rather than months. For a period in 2020 Sunak was the most popular politician in the country, a status no Chancellor sustains, and did not.

The Fall of Johnson and the Rise of Truss

On 5 July 2022 Sunak resigned alongside Javid, citing Boris Johnson's want of integrity and unwillingness to take hard economic decisions. The two resignations broke the government within days. In the leadership contest that followed, Sunak led among Conservative MPs and lost the membership ballot to Liz Truss, having warned throughout that unfunded tax cuts would be punished by the markets.

Seven weeks later the markets punished them. When Truss resigned, Sunak assembled the hundred nominations required within hours; Johnson and Penny Mordaunt withdrew, and on 25 October 2022 he became the 57th Prime Minister, at 42 the first British-Asian, the first Hindu and the first millennial to hold the office.

Picking Up the Pieces

The premiership was, by design, a repair job. He stabilised the public finances with tax rises and spending restraint, which cost him the affection of his own right wing without buying him credit from anyone else. Inflation, above 11 percent when he took office, was below 3 percent by the summer of 2024; the widely predicted deep recession did not arrive, and GDP grew 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2024. He negotiated the Windsor Framework with Brussels in February 2023, defusing the Northern Ireland Protocol dispute that had poisoned relations since Brexit. He visited Kyiv in November 2022 and maintained British support for Ukraine. Britain acceded to the CPTPP trade bloc. He also pursued the Rwanda deportation scheme, the most contested policy of his premiership, sacked Suella Braverman as Home Secretary in November 2023, and brought David Cameron back from retirement as Foreign Secretary in what one chronicler calls an enormous coup de théâtre.

Losing 251 Seats

He called the election on 22 May 2024. The campaign that followed included a decision to leave the eightieth anniversary commemoration of D-Day early, an error of political instinct that no amount of debate preparation could offset. In July the Conservatives lost 251 seats and returned just 121 MPs, the worst result in the party's history. Sunak resigned as leader, stayed on until November 2024, and remained the member for his North Yorkshire seat, the only one of six twenty-first-century former prime ministers still sitting in the Commons.

Why Rishi Is Called a Genius

Sunak is the most conventionally credentialled British prime minister of the modern era: a first from Oxford, a Stanford MBA on a Fulbright, Goldman Sachs, a hedge fund directorship before he was thirty-five. Nobody who has dealt with him doubts the processing power. If the word is used about him at all, it is used about that: an unusual fluency with numbers and an ability to hold a complicated fiscal system in mind and see quickly where the levers are.

The furlough scheme is the strongest evidence. Designing, financing and launching a wage subsidy covering a large share of the workforce, in a matter of weeks, using a tax authority that had never done anything like it, was a genuine feat of administrative engineering under time pressure. That is a real and uncommon capacity, and it is worth calling what it is: technical and organisational, not visionary.

The counter-case is the whole of his premiership. Sunak's failures were not analytical but political, and in politics that distinction offers no shelter. He misread his own party's membership in 2022, having been right on the substance. He could not decide whether to run as a manager or an insurgent and ended up as neither. The D-Day departure was the symptom of a leader who did not instinctively feel how things would look. Above all, the party he led was reduced to 121 seats. A genius label that survives a defeat of that scale would have to rest on something other than the record, and the honest verdict is that Sunak was a formidably able administrator who was not, in the end, a natural politician.

Legacy

Sunak's premiership will be remembered less for what it built than for what it steadied: a currency and a bond market that his predecessor had frightened, an inflation rate brought back to earth, and a workable settlement with the European Union over Northern Ireland. His arrival at the head of a British government, two generations after his grandparents came from India by way of East Africa, was the more significant fact and one he pointedly declined to dramatise. The Conservative Party he handed on was the smallest in its history, and the argument over whether he shrank it or merely presided over the shrinking has barely begun.

Achievements

• member of the 57th Parliament of the United Kingdom (2017–2019)
• member of the 56th Parliament of the United Kingdom (2015–2017)
• member of the 58th Parliament of the United Kingdom (2019–2024)
• Chancellor of the Exchequer (2020–2022)
• Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal
• Order of Liberty — 2024
• Educated at Stanford University and Lincoln College