Golden boy’s high-f lying siblings
TOUTED as a future prime minister by his teachers at the age of nine, Rishi Sunak grew up as the family golden boy, overshadowing his younger brother and sister who strived to match his youthful success.
He would go on to become head boy at his £45,000 a year boarding school, Winchester College, before gaining a place at Oxford University’s Lincoln College to read philosophy, politics and economics.
His younger brother Sanjay is remembered by friends as less chatty but, although two years younger, followed a similar trajectory in his early years of education.
GP father Yashvir and pharmacist mother Usha, who lived in a six-bedroom house in Southampton, paid for Sanjay to go to the same private primary as Rishi, Stroud School.
Sanjay followed in his parents’ footsteps to work in medicine, specialising in psychology, he enrolled as an undergraduate at University College London in 1999 before moving on to postgraduate studies at Birkbeck, University of London, specialising in criminology. At King’s College London he studied forensic mental health before doctorate studies at the University of Surrey in clinical psychology. While studying and teaching there he also began working for the NHS.
Now 40, he is likely to earn a six-figure salary as a consultant clinical psychologist working for a private clinic and Bupa, the private health insurer.
Meanwhile, Rishi’s sister Raakhi, 37, works in New York as chief of strategy and planning at the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies.
As an undergraduate, she founded Oxford’s Unicef society, growing its membership to around 400. Now known as Raakhi Williams after marrying international aid specialist Peter Williams, she helped to organise last year’s COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow for the Government before moving to America to work for the UN.
The three siblings are still close, with Rishi taking time off from political campaigning in 2015 to speak at Raakhi’s wedding.