During the battle for the leadership of the Conservative Party – and therefore the British Prime Minister – last summer, jokes were already being circulated online about how the door of the official residence would look like if Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister. In a photoshopped image, the sidewalk in front of 10 Downing Street was lined with flip flops and sandals, because Asians usually take their shoes off before going anywhere.
Now it’s time. The United Kingdom will have its first Prime Minister with an Indian background. Hindu Rishi Sunak – he is 42 years old, his parents came to the UK in the 1960s – was elected party leader and successor to the resigned Prime Minister Liz Truss on Monday after a lost election battle in September.
It certainly has symbolic value, a prime minister with roots in the British ex-colony of India. Many also see his appointment as confirmation of the successful integration of the Indian community into the UK. Sunak called self the time he in 2020 lights candles outside 11 Downing Street (where he lived as Chancellor of the Exchequer) for the Diwali festival of lights as one of the moments of his ministry he is most proud of.
Sunak managed to get more than half of the Conservative Party faction behind him, with more than 200 of the 357 House of Representatives voting for him. Former leader Boris Johnson pulled out on Sunday, after a weekend full of speculation about his return. The other candidate Penny Mordaunt also withdrew at the very last minute on Monday. It was unclear for both whether they had obtained the necessary hundred statements of support. Many prominent ministers who previously supported Liz Truss and Boris Johnson have now spoken out in favor of Sunak in an effort to restore unity within the party.
Financial markets happy
Sunak’s top priority will therefore be to bring peace and stability, both financially and within his own party. The financial markets saw Sunak as a favorite and that was already noticeable on Monday morning – or was it mainly Boris Johnson’s withdrawal that brought relief? In any case, the British pound rose slightly against the dollar and yields on British government bonds actually fell, a good sign.
Current Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt also expressed his support for Sunak. “In the summer, Rishi warned that unsecured tax cuts would not be sustainable,” writes Hunt in an opinion piece for The Daily Telegraph, referring to the tax cuts that got Liz Truss in big trouble. Hunt is likely to stay on as finance minister, so that he and Sunak will have to try to close the £40 billion gap in the government budget in the coming years.
Since Truss resigned last week, Sunak has not explained his policy plans in detail anywhere. In announcing his candidacy, he promised “integrity, professionalism and accountability” in his government and that he will “fix the economy”, but exactly how he intends to do that is still unclear.
Also read: Indian Brits are proud of Rishi Sunak
During the leadership battle over the summer, Sunak said he too is in favor of tax cuts, as is Truss, but not until inflation is brought under control. He would like to lower income taxes, but only in the next term of office. The chance that he will now make such a promise as prime minister is slim, as public finances have only deteriorated since that campaign, due to rising interest rates on loans.
The economy will clearly be a political priority in the coming months. on other areas Sunak showed himself as right as Truss. For example, he wants to continue the plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and he would like a narrower definition of asylum status in order to deter migrants from crossing the Channel from France. With regard to the negotiations on Northern Ireland with the European Union, Sunak, like Truss, wants to push through the bill that will unilaterally adjust the agreements on customs controls in Northern Ireland.
Affair about taxes
Sunak worked as a banker in the City of London before joining the House of Commons in 2015. In February 2020, he took office as Treasury Secretary in Boris Johnson’s government. Just a few months after taking office, he set up a huge social safety net worth hundreds of billions of pounds due to the corona lockdowns. Most Brits know him from that.
In April this year, Sunak discredited because his wife Akshata Murty, one of the wealthiest women in the UK thanks to her shares in Indian technology company Infosys, turned out not to be a resident of the UK and thus did not pay tax on her wealth. It may have been by the rules, but against the sore leg of many Britons. Murty was quick to announce that she would pay taxes from now on and Sunak learned a lot from the affair, he later said.
With Sunak as the third Conservative prime minister in two months, and the second to have no direct mandate from the British people but only from their own faction, opposition parties again pushed for national elections on Monday. It’s not likely that they will come any time soon. The Conservative Party will first want to repair – or at least attempt to – the damage of the shortest-ever premiership under Liz Truss.
Also read: 45 days of Liz Truss: the downfall of Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister ever