Rich, slick and, yes, dishy, is Rishi playing a long game for a short hop next door?
His free-spending Budget may have raised Tory hackles, but our charismatic Chancellor is unlikely to let that hold him back, says an Express columnist
THERE he stood at the dispatch box, too cool for school, delivering the most eye-watering Conservative Budget in many years. Taxes up, benefits spend up, more money hurled at the NHS, an extraordinary £150billion spree – and all of it at odds with Rishi Sunak’s image of a cautious politician, determined to rein in public spending and cut Britain’s staggering £2.2trillion debt.
Perhaps he still will. For in many eyes, this was very much a Boris Budget, with the Chancellor going along for the ride because he’s playing a much longer game.
Behind that level gaze, unflappable demeanour and effortless courtesy there is a magnetism that draws people in.Voters may love to laugh at good old Boris, but they actually listen to Rishi.
It helps that he is always on top of his brief (not knowing his Bury from his Burnley was a rare lapse). So just who IS Rishi Sunak, the man many believe will be our next Prime Minister?
The eldest son of first generation immigrant parents, on his journey through public school, Oxford, a career as a fund manager (during which he certainly learned the value of money) and a stratospheric rise since entering politics in 2014, Dishy Rishi has shown himself to be as politically adept as he is photogenic.
While William Hague, the former incumbent of his Richmond (Yorks) safe seat, made himself a laughing stock in a baseball cap, Rishi manages to carry off everything he wears, from stylish shades and hoodies to super-smart business suits, in marked contrast to his current boss.
He is adept at rolling up the sleeves of his elegant, fitted shirts to wait at table when highlighting the need to “eat out to help out”, and seems to have got away with those ghastly sliders, a very unwise sandal choice, in the run-up to the Budget. He even wore them with socks!
BUT this is about the sole mis-step (pun intended) in a career and a life in which he has shown almost preternatural calm while dealing with all the turbulence that his political life has thrown at him.
The fact that he has a rock solid family life, with an heiress wife who is a businesswoman in her own right, and two daughters, cannot hurt and there, too, he is in marked contrast to the PM.
While Boris appears to have found some form of domestic happiness with third wife Carrie, his own rackety old marital history and constant cash shortages, which have an unfortunate habit of hitting the headlines, must have been a drain on a character even bouncy as his.
Rishi, though, is a happily married family man who happens to have £200 million in the bank, which must cause some prime ministerial grinding of teeth.
At the moment, matters appear to be on an even keel in Downing Street. And it’s as well they are because, as both men will know, fallings out between premiers and their chancellors tend to end up destroying them both. Look at Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson. Or John Major and Norman Lamont. Or Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
So how did Rishi, who is barely out of his thirties, reach such stratospheric heights that
there is now a real chance he might become our first prime minister of Asian origin? (If Sadiq Khan and Priti Patel don’t get there first.)
He was born on May 12, 1980, in Southampton to Yashvir, a GP, and Usha, a pharmacist, both Hindus of Punjabi stock who came from East Africa, and he had a privileged upbringing.
Educated at Winchester College public school (where he was head boy, naturally), he waited tables at a curry house during the holidays – which must have come in useful during his brief stint at a London branch of Wagamama during the pandemic. He went
on to read PPE at Lincoln College, Oxford. It’s an upbringing which would have given him a crash course into many different sides of British culture.
“My parents emigrated here, so you’ve got this generation of people who are born here, their parents were not born here, and they’ve come to this country to make a life,” he once told the BBC.
“In terms of cultural upbringing, I’d be at the temple at the weekend – I’m a Hindu – but I’d also be at [Southampton Football Club] the Saints game as well on a Saturday. You do everything, you do both.”
That love of football is another tick in the relatability box. Despite his great wealth, Rishi manages to come across as a man of the people, something not many politicians (arrogance and ego are not unknown in the house) can pull off.
Anyone of Asian origin growing up in that era would have experienced racism, and Rishi was no exception, although he has never played the victim card.
“I was just out with my younger brother and younger sister… I was probably a midteenager, and we were out at a fast food restaurant and I was just looking after them,” he once recalled.
“There were people sitting nearby, it was the first time I’d experienced it, just saying some very unpleasant things. The ‘P’ word. And it stung. I still remember it. It seared in my memory. You can be insulted in many different ways.”
However, he “can’t conceive of that
happening today” in the UK, he went on. After Oxford, Rishi went on to get an MBA from Stanford University in the US, where he was a Fulbright scholar, and where he met Akshata Murthy, daughter of the Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder of Indian tech giant Infosys.
THE couple married in 2009 and have two daughters; Akshata is worth £430million in her own right, as a director in her father’s Catamaran Ventures, in which she has shares, and she also runs a fashion label. Unlike her teetotal husband she has been pictured with glasses of champagne.
The family now have homes in Kirby Sigston, in North Yorkshire, Kensington and Santa Monica, California. The Yorkshire home is a sprawling manor house, set on acres of land, where the family tend to spend weekends, and they have been granted planning permission for a pool house and tennis court.
Rishi’s years as a financier, first for Goldman Sachs, then Children’s Investment Fund Management and finally the hedge fund firm Theleme Partners, clearly paid off.
In 2014, he was selected as the Conservative candidate for Richmond, Yorks, and that year also became the head of the Black and Minority Ethnic Research Unit of the right wing think tank Policy Exchange.
He entered Parliament the following year, increased his majority in both the 2017 and 2019 elections and was an outspoken supporter of the Leave campaign on Brexit. “I believe that appropriate immigration can benefit our country. But we must have control of our borders,” he said. He supported Boris Johnson’s leadership bid and was rewarded with the post of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, before succeeding to the role of Chancellor in February 2020 after the then incumbent, Sajid Javid, walked out after a Dominic Cummingsrelated row with Number 10. Rishi could not possibly have foreseen that his role would be dominated not by Brexit, but by a pandemic, which was taking hold even as he stepped into his post. Since then he has been work
‘In terms of cultural upbringing, I’d be at the temple at weekends…and also at the game’
ing in the coal face, throwing trillions around to keep the economy afloat.
Of course, courtesy of his earlier financial career, he is familiar with dealing with huge sums of money and, even under the most intense pressure, nothing seems to have fazed him.
Criticism of an overspending Budget is very unlikely to bother him.
So what, for our charismatic and photogenic Chancellor, is next?