Rishi Sunak (born 12 May 1980) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 25 October 2022 to 5 July 2024, succeeding Liz Truss and preceding Keir Starmer; he also served as the Conservative Party MP for Richmond (Yorkshire) from 7 May 2015, succeeding William Hague.
Biography[]
Rishi Sunak was born in Southampton, Hampshire, England on 12 May 1980, the grandson of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa. He worked as a Goldman Sachs investment banker and as the director of an investment firm before entering politics with the Conservative Party. He was elected to Parliament as the Tory MP for Richmond in Yorkshire in 2015, and he became a close ally of Boris Johnson, during whose premiership Sunak became a rising star in the Conservative Party. Sunak served in Johnson's Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2020 and as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022, replacing Sajid Javid after a cabinet reshuffle. While his first Conservative leadership bid in 2022 was unsuccessful, as he lost to the more right-wing Liz Truss, he won the contest to succeed her on her resignation in October. Sunak presided over a cost of living and energy supply crisis, industrial disputes and strikes, continued foreign aid and weapons shipments to Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and schisms within his party over taxation measures and his plan to process asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Rwanda. By the end of the first year of his premiership, the Conservatives were imperiled by a seemingly-inevitable electoral defeat in 2024 and factional infighting. The Conservatives' 2024 election campaign was marred by scandals such as Sunak's early departure from a D-Day veterans' ceremony in Normandy for a campaign interview and election betting incidents involving prominent Conservatives, and the Tories suffered their worst electoral defeat, losing 251 seats (including those of 12 Cabinet ministers) and having their vote share reduced from the 2019 total of 43.6% to 23.7%. Sunak resigned as Conservative Party leader in the aftermath of the election, and Kemi Badenoch succeeded him.