Rishi Sunak

Biography

Rishi Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980 to Indian parents who had come to Britain from East Africa. He was head boy at Winchester College, graduated with first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics from Lincoln College, Oxford, in 2001, and earned an MBA at Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar in 2006. He worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2001 to 2004 and then at hedge funds, including The Children's Investment Fund Management.

Elected Conservative MP for Richmond (Yorks) in 2015, he supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum. He became a junior local government minister in 2018 and Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2019, and in February 2020 Boris Johnson appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer. In that role he led the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the furlough and Eat Out to Help Out schemes.

Sunak resigned as chancellor in July 2022 and lost the summer leadership contest to Liz Truss. When Truss stepped down weeks later he was elected party leader unopposed and became prime minister in October 2022, aged 42. He set targets on inflation, growth, debt, NHS waiting lists and small-boat Channel crossings, pursued the Rwanda asylum plan, agreed the Windsor Framework with the European Union on Northern Ireland trade, and sent aid and weapons to Ukraine.

He called an early general election for July 2024, which the Conservatives lost in a landslide to Keir Starmer's Labour Party. He was Leader of the Opposition until Kemi Badenoch succeeded him as party leader in November 2024, and he remains a backbench MP; in 2025 he returned to Goldman Sachs as a part-time senior adviser.