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Rishi Sunak will soon become the new prime minister of the UK.
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His family’s wealth clocks in at an estimated $825 million, making him one of the richest people in Britain.
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Sunak has drawn intense criticism for tax and visa scandals in the past.
Rishi Sunak is set to become Britain’s newest prime minister, taking over from Liz Truss after her astonishingly short — and chaotic — time in office.
Truss’s slashing of taxes and subsequent policy U-turns during her brief six weeks in office spooked the markets and plunged Britain into financial turmoil.
Her aggressive tax-cutting plan coupled with already soaring interest rates and a squeeze on energy prices worldwide has left many Brits with distinct financial worries and in a cost of living crisis.
The UK now has more food banks than McDonald’s, and many people are making the choice between eating and heating their homes, as Insider’s Bethany Dawson reported. The Guardian reported in August that almost a quarter of the country is planning not to turn on the heating this winter.
On Monday, October 24, Sunak secured the backing of his Conservative Party to become its leader, thereby becoming the UK’s presumptive PM.
As a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak’s grasp of fiscal policy may be welcomed by a country facing immense financial difficulties.
However, Sunak also faces fierce criticism for his family’s extraordinary wealth. With a net worth that is more than double that of King Charles III, many fear that Sunak will not be able to understand the daily financial struggles his constituents face, especially as Britain prepares to face a deep recession.
Political research consultancy Savanta ComRes summed up public sentiment in a tweeted word cloud on Monday, based on the most common responses given to the surveyed question, “How would you describe Rishi Sunak in one word?”
“Clever,” “good,” and “okay” were prominently featured, but they were dwarfed by one word: “Rich.” At the time of publication, the survey’s methodology was not made public.
A privileged childhood
Sunak’s parents were born in colonial Africa — his father, Yashvir, in Kenya, and his mother, Usha, in Tanzania. They met and married in the UK, where his father became a general practitioner and his mother went on to run a pharmacy. In a story for Tatler, a family friend described the pair as “passionately British.” Sunak was educated at Winchester College — a fee-paying school that, in 2022, cost $38,500 to $52,000 a year to attend. In an interview with Sky News, he expressed an understanding of how beneficial attending Winchester was for his career: “I was really lucky to have that opportunity. It was something that was really extraordinary, it certainly put my life on a different trajectory.”
Sunak became head boy at the distinguished boarding school before taking a path well-trodden for British politicians, studying philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford. There, he received a First, the highest accolade for an undergraduate degree.
It was during a Fulbright scholarship at Stanford in 2006, where Sunak gained an MBA, that his future fortune first entered his life. It was there where he met Akshata Murthy, the daughter of Infosys billionaire Narayana Murthy. The couple married in 2009 in an extravagant two-day wedding in Bangalore. Together, the couple’s wealth is estimated at $825 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List — more than double the estimated $340 million wealth of King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort.
It’s a union that made Sunak the first frontline UK politician to enter The Sunday Times’ annual wealth listing.
After becoming the Conservative Party’s MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire in 2015, he was soon seen as a rising star and became Boris Johnson’s chancellor between 2020 and 2022.
In that role, he…