EXCLUSIVE: Young Rishi’s carefree days in Mayfair club loved by celebrities
SHOWING a glimpse of chest hair and warmly embracing his future wife, this is a carefree young Rishi Sunak long before he became embroiled in the world of politics.
Photographed in 2008 carousing in a members-only Mayfair nightclub, he had just moved from California to work in London for a hedge fund run by a billionaire financier.
Aged 28, Sunak was dating his future wife Akshata Murty, but the couple had just been forced to make a very difficult decision.
While he had headed to Britain, she felt rooted in America and had decided to stay there, enrolling on a postgraduate course at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in LA.
Despite living 5,400 miles apart, the couple regularly flew back and forth across the Atlantic.
These photographs show how they spent an evening with friends at the Whisky Mist nightclub in London.
Ms Murty is seen with a cocktail while Mr Sunak (who says he’s teetotal and ‘a total Coca-Cola addict’) generously bought all the drinks that night for the couple’s friends. At the time, the club off Park Lane was popular with the young Prince Harry and celebrities such as Beyoncé and Leonardo DiCaprio. Many years later, Tesla tycoon Elon Musk met his second wife, actress Tallulah Riley, there.
Whisky Mist was apparently named after an incident during which a tipsy Queen Victoria thought she’d spotted a stag in the fog from the window of Balmoral Castle.
Friends with Mr Sunak and his girlfriend that night recall how many of the guests were focused on Ms Murty because of her family’s fabulous wealth.
Her father founded global IT giant Infosys.
Mr Sunak was described by a female reveller as ‘the most attentive boyfriend you have ever seen’ and as ‘someone who would ask a lot of questions but not give too much away about himself’.
Not long before, he had been to Africa where he met some of Barack Obama’s relatives. He was photographed with them while holding a copy of the future US president’s book, Dreams From My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritance. The picture was posted on Mr Sunak’s Facebook page. Mr Obama used his book as a primer to introduce himself to the American people as he campaigned in 2008 to become the first black US president. Fourteen years on, the young Briton captivated by that book is campaigning to become Britain’s first Prime Minister of Asian
heritage – and of America’s greatest ally.