October 25, (THEWILL) – Rishi Sunak, officially took over as Britain’s prime minister on Tuesday after meeting with King Charles at Buckingham Palace, where he received symbolic permission to take up the role during a ceremony known as the “kissing of the hands.”
Sunak will appoint a cabinet that will have to wrestle with the U.K.’s economic and political crises.
King Charles assumed the ceremonial role of accepting Liz Truss’s resignation at Buckingham Palace before asking Sunak to form a government.
As he returned to the prime minister’s office at 10 Downing St., on Tuesday, Sunak promised to tackle Britain’s “profound economic crisis” and earn the country’s trust in an address to the nation.
“I will place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda. This will mean difficult decisions to come”, he said.
Sunak pledged in doing so to “not leave the next generation — your children and your grandchildren —with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves.”
Born in Southampton to parents of Indian descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s, Sunak, 42, becomes the first British-Indian to be appointed Prime Minister in UK, and one of the youngest to occupy the office in a century.
Sunak is the fifth British prime minister in six years, the third in less than two months.
Sunak was educated at Winchester College. He subsequently read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Lincoln College, Oxford, and later gained an MBA from Stanford University in California as a Fulbright Scholar.
He is married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire businessman who founded Infosys.
Sunak and Murty are the 222nd richest people in Britain, with a combined fortune of £730m as of 2022
He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Richmond (Yorks) since 2015. He was appointed to Theresa May’s second government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government in the 2018 reshuffle.
After May resigned, Sunak supported Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Conservative leader.
Soon after Johnson was elected and appointed Prime Minister, he appointed Sunak as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2019.
He again replaced Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer after his resignation in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle.
Sunak however resigned as chancellor on 5 July, 2022, citing his economic policy differences with Johnson in his resignation letter.
In July 2022, he stood in the Conservative party leadership election to replace Johnson and lost the members’ vote to Liz Truss.
He won an internal party contest to be the country’s new leader following Truss’ Oct. 20 resignation. Her tenure was the shortest ever for a British prime minister and was marked by economic turmoil.
