Rishi Sunak, Who Took Oath On Gita, Bids To Be Britain’s 1st PM Of Colour
Rishi Sunak was on the fast track to becoming Britain’s first prime minister of colour before his dramatic falling out with Boris Johnson.
If the Hindu ancestor of immigrants from East Africa and India were to rule the fifth-largest economy in the world, it would be a historic moment.
Sunak must, however, persuade the party’s members as ballots are distributed on Monday in order to go to the final run-off after a series of votes by Conservative MPs, and he is far behind Liz Truss.
According to opinion polls, she has so far outmanoeuvred him with programmes aimed at the Tory right, which also distrusts Sunak because of his involvement in the cabinet coup that forced Johnson to resign after months of scandal.
The former chancellor of the exchequer, who amassed enormous wealth from his career in banking before entering politics, has also been ridiculed for being out of touch with the struggles faced by Britons due to rising inflation.
This month on the campaign trail, he was accused of “mansplaining” to Truss during a heated TV discussion when he attacked her tax-cutting proposals while wearing pricey Prada loafers while visiting a construction site.
Sunak, a 42-year-old policy expert with attention to detail, supported Brexit from the start and became chancellor in February 2020.
As an MP, Sunak takes the Bhagavad Gita as the foundation for his oath of allegiance. In January 2018, Theresa May appointed him to his first position in the government as a junior minister for local government, parks, and troubled families.
Sunak’s grandparents were from Punjab and emigrated to Britain from eastern Africa in the 1960s.
They arrived with “very little”, Sunak told MPs in his maiden speech in 2015. His father was a family doctor in Southampton on the southern English coast, and his mother ran a local pharmacy.
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