Rishi Sunak (born 12 May 1980) is a British politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from October 2022 to July 2024. He was the first British Asian and the first Hindu to hold the office, and at forty-two the youngest Prime Minister in more than two centuries. He was earlier Chancellor of the Exchequer during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Rishi Sunak |
| Born | 12 May 1980, Southampton, England |
| Age | 46 |
| Nationality | British |
| Indian roots | Grandparents from Punjab, who emigrated to East Africa |
| Education | Winchester College; Lincoln College, Oxford (PPE); Stanford University (MBA) |
| Party | Conservative |
| Offices | Prime Minister (2022–2024); Chancellor of the Exchequer (2020–2022) |
| Spouse | Akshata Murty (m. 2009) |
| Children | 2 |
Early Life
He was born in Southampton, the eldest of three children. His father, Yashvir, was a family doctor, and his mother, Usha, ran a pharmacy; both had been born in East Africa, in Kenya and Tanganyika, to families that had emigrated from Punjab, and came to Britain in the 1960s. He has often spoken of helping in his mother’s shop.
Education
He was educated at Winchester College, where he was head boy, and read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with first-class honours in 2001. He later took an MBA at Stanford University as a Fulbright scholar. It was there that he met his future wife.
Career
Finance
He worked for the investment bank Goldman Sachs and then for two hedge funds in London and California.
Parliament
He was elected Conservative MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire in 2015, succeeding William Hague. He supported leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum.
Chancellor
Boris Johnson made him Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2019 and, in February 2020, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Weeks later the pandemic began. He introduced the furlough scheme, under which the state paid most of the wages of millions of workers, and the “Eat Out to Help Out” restaurant discount. He resigned in July 2022, helping to bring down Johnson’s government, and lost the contest to succeed him to Liz Truss.
Prime Minister
When Truss resigned after seven weeks, he was chosen unopposed and took office on 25 October 2022.
- He steadied the public finances after the turmoil of his predecessor’s budget.
- He negotiated the Windsor Framework with the European Union on trade in Northern Ireland.
- He set five pledges, including halving inflation and stopping small-boat crossings of the Channel, and pursued a plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
- He hosted the first international summit on the safety of artificial intelligence, at Bletchley Park in 2023.
He called an election for 4 July 2024. The Conservatives suffered the worst defeat in their history, and Keir Starmer of the Labour Party became Prime Minister. Sunak remained party leader until November 2024.
After Office
He continues to sit as MP for Richmond and Northallerton. In 2025 he took up advisory roles with Goldman Sachs and with technology companies, saying the earnings would go to the Richmond Project, a charity he and his wife founded to improve numeracy.
Personal Life
In 2009 he married Akshata Murty, daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, in Bengaluru. They have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka. Her shareholding in Infosys makes the couple among the richest people in Britain. He is a practising Hindu and took his oath as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita.
Featured image: Official portrait of Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, November 2022. Photo by the Prime Minister’s Office, licensed under OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons.
