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| Rishi Sunak, Britain's 57th prime minister |
Rishi Sunak who became Britain's 57th prime minister on Tuesday is richer than the monarch and younger than all predecessors except William Pitt the Younger at 42. Rishi Sunak is the UK's first Indian-origin prime minister, once replacing his leadership rival Liz Truss.
Here's everything you need to know about former UK chancellor Rishi Sunak, who on Monday garnered his party's backing to take the top post.
Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980 to Indian parents who had moved to the UK from East Africa. His father was a GP and his mother ran her own pharmacy. The eldest of three children, Sunak was educated at Winchester College, a private boarding school that costs £43,335 a year to attend. He was the head boy, and in recent years he has made several donations to the school in excess of £100,000.
Sunak studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford. He was awarded a first class degree. He later obtained a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Stanford University, where he met his future wife, Akshata Murthy, daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy.
Murthy, 42, is the daughter of Indian billionaire NR Narayana Murthy, often described as the Bill Gates of India, who founded the software company Infosys. According to reports, his daughter owns a 0.91% stake in the company, which is worth around £700m.
The couple married in 2009 in a two-day ceremony in their hometown of Bengaluru, which was attended by 1,000 guests. They have two daughters, Krishna and Anushka. In April this year it emerged that Murthy was a non-resident UK resident, meaning he evaded UK taxes on his international earnings in exchange for paying an annual fee of £30,000.
Rishi Sunak became a Member of Parliament (MP) in 2015 after being elected from Richmond, Yorkshire. In February 2020, he was named as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Britain's most important cabinet post. Rishi Sunak was widely appreciated for his economic package for employees and businesses during the Covid pandemic.
The road to the top of Sunak was not an easy one. After losing to Liz Truss in a vote of Tory members on 5 September, he was expected to disappear from politics – and quickly, speaking for the last time in the Commons the day after Truss became prime minister. But when Truss's disastrous and ill-funded tax cuts put him in flames, Sunak was ready with the backing of the supporters he gathered in the summer campaign.
