Rishi Sunak: the polished ‘tech bro’ with low-tax dreams
Rishi Sunak is renowned at Westminster for burnishing his brand in preparation to make a bid for the top job – but it now appears he may get the opportunity much sooner than expected. If he does succeed Boris Johnson in No 10, he will be one of the wealthiest prime ministers in history. And if it happens before his 42nd birthday, in mid-May, he will be the youngest in more than 250 years.
Well-tailored and whip-smart, the chancellor has been assiduously wooing Conservative MPs, and polls suggest he is well-liked by the public – or certainly more so than his beleaguered boss. An Ipsos Mori poll taken in the past few days gave Sunak a net favourability rating of +7, against Johnson’s -39, and -14 for the Labour leader, Keir Starmer.
But with a cost of living crisis looming, some at Westminster are questioning whether Sunak’s political worldview is the right one for this moment – and asking if he is “streetwise” enough to make the move next door.
The son of Punjabi immigrants from east Africa, Sunak studied at Winchester public school before graduating from Oxford in philosophy, politics and economics.
While his classmates were partying, the nerdy Sunak became president of the Oxford Investment Club and he went on to pursue a career in the City, breaking off to take an MBA at Stanford in the US, where he met his wife, Akshata Murthy.
They certainly wouldn’t need to raise funds for wallpaper. Murthy owns a 0.91% stake in Infosys, the Indian tech giant founded by her father, according to its annual report.
The chancellor’s investments from his days as a hedge fund manager are tucked away in a blind trust – but Murthy’s share of the family firm alone is worth more than £700m at current prices, and the pair own a string of
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