Slightly smug Head Boy vs Maggie’s sterner sister

Irreverent portraits of wannabe PMs by RICHARD KAY and ANDREW PIERCE

Looks like: A rather-too-pleased-with-himself public school head boy — verging on smug.

Age: Just 42, so if he wins, he would be youngest Prime Minister since Earl of Liverpool, 42 years and one day, who became PM in 1812 after the assassination of Spencer Perceval.

Family history: The eldest of three children, Sunak was born on May 12, 1980, to Indian heritage parents in Southampton, where his father was a GP and his mother ran a pharmacy. His maternal grandmother had emigrated from East Africa to Britain in the 1960s and the family, including his mother, aged 15, followed a year later.

Alma mater: Like five Chancellors of the Exchequer before him, Sunak went to exclusive Winchester College (fees today £46,000), where, you guessed it, Rishi was head boy. From there, he headed to Oxford, where (of course) he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and then won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Stanford University in the U.S.

Significant other: Wife is Akshata Murthy (below right), whom he met at Stanford. She’s the daughter of an Indian billionaire, N.R. Narayana Murthy, known as ‘the Bill Gates of India’ for founding the software giant, Infosys. Her 0.91 per cent stake in the company gives her an estimated £700 million in shares, which makes her richer than the Queen. The couple invited 1,000 guests to their two-day wedding spectacular in Bangalore, India, in 2009. They have two young daughters, Krishna and Anoushka.

Chez Rishi: Well, where to start. There’s a £7million townhouse in Kensington, a £1.5million mansion in his Yorkshire constituency of Richmond, a Central London flat, and, oh yes, the £5 million ocean view penthouse in Santa Monica, California.

Other significant others: A one-yearold labrador retriever, Nova (far right), named after a star that appears as a sudden, bright light until it gradually fades (a bit like his devotion and allegiance to Boris).

Political flexibility: Backed Brexit but his support for leaving the EU was strategic (he knew future Tory leaders would be Brexiteers) and showed tactical nous by describing Boris as the ‘saviour of the Tory’ party two days before the start of the 2019 Tory leadership campaign. It was, ironically, also Sunak’s resignation as Chancellor that triggered Johnson’s downfall.

Speaking style: He’s modelled himself on Tony Blair, even down to those annoying verbal tics — he ends his sentences with that familiar rhetorical uptick “right?”

Nicknames: Dishy Rishi aka ‘Maharajah of the Dales’ on account of the summer garden party he throws for locals in the grounds of his magnificent Yorkshire manor house, said to be one of the hottest tickets on the North Riding social calendar. But less flatteringly he’s also known as ‘Mr Tax’ because of all the rises he’s presided over since 2020 and has been labelled a ‘socialist’ (© Jacob Rees-Mogg). By the faithful inside No 10 he’s known as a ‘treacherous b ***** d’.

First political experience: Internship at Conservative Campaign HQ while at university when Iain Duncan Smith was party leader. He obviously made a good impression. IDS is pointedly backing Liz Truss for the leadership Maiden speech: ‘Wandering through an auction market, I was introduced to a farmer as the “new William Hague”,’ he said. ‘The farmer looked at me, quizzically, then said: “Ah yes, Haguey! Good bloke. I like him. Bit pale, though. This one’s got a better tan.” ’

Bad habits: Addicted to CocaCola and has the expensive dental work to show for it. Perhaps he things it makes him The Real Thing.

Let Them Eat Cake moment: When Sunak quit the Cabinet his, wife Akshata brought out mugs of hot tea and biscuits for the journalists assembled outside. Not just any mugs: they were from designer Emma Lacey’s exclusive range of tableware, available at a cool £38 each.

Sartorial style: Money no object. He may have tightened the nation’s belt in his last Budget, but there is no expense spared on his own £160 skintight, hand-crafted shirts and £2,000 ankle-skimming suits from Henry Herbert in Savile Row. But he’s so touchy about the cost the tailor is banned from using Sunak in any promotional material. And yesterday he was modelling another number from the same tailor, thought to have cost an eye-watering £3,500.

Favourite footwear: White leather Common Projects trainers but there’s nothing common about the price — £299 a pair. And don’t forget those natty brown suede loafters he wore on a visit to a Teesside construction site the other day. The label? Prada. The cost? £490 — more than a week’s average wage in the area. Most likely to say: ‘I have no working class friends.’ A video clip of a young Sunak speaking on a 2007 documentary emerged last weekend in which he said: ‘I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class . . . well, not working class.’

Least likely to say: ‘I see eye to eye with Emmanuel Macron.’ Like Tom Cruise, Macron is a tad on the short side and Rishi, at 5ft 6in (ish), is sensitive about his height. Thanks to some carefully planned positioning and camera know-how, the former Chancellor generally managed to look taller than others in the routine Budget Day shots outside No11. U.S. research suggests that in presidential elections, the taller candidate has won two-thirds of the time, so maybe there is something in his strategy. If he wins, Sunak will be the shortest PM since Winston Churchill.

Social media moment: Earlier this year, a video emerged of a Rishi lookalike throwing some shapes at a beach club run by Gary Lineker’s brother Wayne in Ibiza. The dancer is shirtless, wearing black sunglasses, Versace shorts and a shiny watch. Was it Strictly Sunak . . ?

Rags to riches: Er, not exactly. After university he went to work for Goldman Sachs, the bank so adept at piling up profits it became known as a ‘blood-sucking vampire squid’. He then set up his own private investment partnership with an initial fund of a mere £536 million.

Gaffes: Surprisingly numerous for one so politically astute. Was photographed on his laptop with an Ember Travel Mug — a sleek, black, Bluetooth-enabled drinking vessel that allows owners to control the temperature of their coffee from an app on their phone. Its price made many spit out their coffee — £179.95. Asked on Spectator TV if as PM he would spend more time in Scotland, he replied: ‘I think people can already see I take that seriously — I was the Chancellor who set up an economic campus for the Government and for the treasury of Darlington.’ The town is 230 miles from Scotland. Last year, he obtained planning permission for a swimming pool, four showers and a tennis court at his Grade II-listed country pile, just as he was cutting the £20a-week uplift in Universal Credit.

Career highs: The ‘shock and awe’ of his emergency Budget in 2020 when he bailed out the country with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to protect jobs through the furlough scheme.

Career lows: Tax increases to meet the furlough bill and NHS shortfall was just the start as the gloss came off. In April it was revealed his wife was a non-dom resident meaning she was not required to pay tax on her huge overseas income — and he had retained a U.S. ‘green card’ meaning he could upsticks at any time and live and work in America until as recently as last October. But his back-stabbing of Boris could prove to be the biggest mis-step of all. Tory activists don’t like disloyalty — remember what happened to Michael Heseltine.

Looks like: Margaret Thatcher’s sterner sister (mostly) although there’s a twinkle in her eye on occasion.

Age: 46, which would make her the youngest ever Tory woman leader (Mrs T was 49, Theresa May, 59).

Family: Mary Elizabeth Truss was born in Oxford on July 26, 1975, the second of five children — but was always known by her middle name and later opted to be called plain Liz.

Political baptism: Joined her mother, a nurse and a teacher, on marches in her then home town of Paisley, Renfrewshire, where her father lectured at the technology college in the 1980s. She recalls chanting ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out’. Both parents, John and Priscilla, were Labour Party activists. Aged seven she joined the right-on Greenham Common women’s peace camp where they all held hands and sang anti-Thatcher ditties.

Education:

Roundhay Comprehensive in Leeds from where she won a place to study PPE at Merton College, Oxford. Hers was not so much a rags-to-riches story but an escape from the ideological claims of what she has said was her ‘left of Labour’ family.

Significant other: Married accountant Hugh O’Leary, an LSE graduate, in 2000. They met at the 1997 Tory conference. Love at first sight? Not exactly. On their first date at an ice-skating rink he fell over and sprained his ankle. The marriage survived her affair with a fellow Tory MP, Mark Field. Hugh works from their home in Greenwich, SouthEast London, so he can support their teenage daughters, Frances and Liberty, who attend a selective state school.

Chez Liz: A three-bed constituency home in the market town of Thetford, Norfolk (bought in 2010 for £180,000) and the house in Greenwich.

Political flexibility:

At Oxford she was president of the Lib Dem Society. ‘I was on a political journey,’ she explains today. Voted Remain but now has all the passion and zeal of a convert.

First political speech:

She may be the Queen’s 26th Foreign Secretary but she is almost certainly the only one to make a speech calling for the abolition of the monarchy.

It was at the 1994 Lib Dem conference, which will make for an interesting conversation with the Queen in the first weekly audience if she does becomes her 15th Prime Minister.

A little local difficulty:

Elected for the first time in South West Norfolk in 2010 but it very nearly never happened.

Some Tory Association members — dubbed the Turnip Taliban — tried to deselect her only weeks after they chose her in 2009.

They had discovered that she had had the aforementioned affair several years earlier.

She well and truly ‘mashed’ the turnip brigade according to her supporters.

Political controversy: By now a free marketeer, in 2012 she had co-written Britannia Unchained, a book advocating free-market economics, in which she declared: ‘The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early, and our productivity is poor.’ Far from hampering her progression, it marked her out from the rest of the 2010 intake.

Bad habits: A weekly takeaway from Bleecker, the fancy, upscale hamburger chain (named after the famous Bleecker Street in the New York district of Manhattan). Woe betide anyone who serves the burger with mayonnaise, which she hates.

Sartorial style: Block bright colours, particularly electric blue and pillar-box red, are a wardrobe staple. She wears streamlined sheath dresses (think Sheryl Sandberg) with heels and trouser suits (don’t think Angela Merkel). Her favourite labels are Karen Millen and Winser. She’s not averse to flashing her knees.

Real-world experience: After university, she worked as an accountant, was a commercial manager at Shell, an account director at Cable & Wireless and worked for the Reform think tank.

Speaking style: Robotic. By her own admission she is a poor public speaker with a voice often compared to that of a Dalek. It probably doesn’t help that she downs a double espresso and plugs on her AirPods for a blast of energising pop before she gets on to the podium. So far, she is resisting voice coaching — unlike Mrs T. People, she says, want the

unvarnished Liz.

Cheesiest speech:

At the 2014 Tory Party conference, the then Environment Secretary launched into an impassioned speech about British cheese: ‘We import twothirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace!’ There was a long embarrassed silence in the conference hall — but the video clip went viral.

Cabinet career:

Served three prime ministers, David Cameron, Theresa May, whom she said ‘worked like a Trojan’, and Boris Johnson, who she said merely ‘studied the Trojans’. When appointed Environment Secretary, her knowledge of farming was said to be limited to the contents of the organic yoghurt she favoured from her local branch of Waitrose.

Heroes: Margaret Thatcher (natch!) and Ayra Stark, the teenage assassin in Game Of Thrones, whom she admired for her ruthless ability to despatch her enemies.

Favourite form of relaxation:

Karaoke evenings in the ministerial corridor which she organises with Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey, her closest friend in the Cabinet. By all accounts, she’s rather good. Her party piece is Time Of My Life, by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, from the film Dirty Dancing.

Anything else? She likes to dance to Taylor Swift (bottom left with Truss) and Little Mix. Enjoys trash TV and loved Veep (natch), a U.S. political satire about an ambitious vice-president, Selina Meyer.

A flag-waving patriot? I’ll say. There’s a Union Flag at home which always features in the background of a Zoom call. Then there are the photographs she has posed for so deliberately, evocative of Margaret Thatcher, from manoeuvres in a tank in Estonia (below) and wearing a fur hat in Red Square, Moscow. Truss shrugged off the similarities with the Iron Lady as a ‘mere coincidence’.

Social media shout-outs:

She was the first Cabinet minister to recruit an aide to promote her image on Instagram. As Trade Secretary for each deal she signed (there were 68), she posted shots of her shaking the hand of her opposite number in front of that Union Flag. The fact that many of the trade deals had been set up by her predecessor, Liam Fox, is skated over.

Ambitious? Well, her most recent Christmas card saw her strike a distinctly regal pose in her office flanked by an antique globe and the Union Flag. It provoked considerable hilarity. ‘Season’s greetings from Elizabeth III,’ was one of the kinder observations. As Rishi is about to discover, he’s got a fight on his hands.