Rishi Sunak

• 1. Introduction

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  Rishi Sunak once stood in the House of Commons and said that on the government benches, life comes at you fast. He had earned the right to say it. Within a few years he had gone from a name most voters did not know to the most powerful office in the country, and then back to the opposition benches. He joked that before you know it, "you have a bright future behind you". Few British politicians have been praised and doubted in such quick succession.

  This documentary asks how the son of a family doctor and a pharmacist reached Downing Street. It asks why a chancellor who was popular in 2020 had lost much of that goodwill by 2022. And it asks what happens to a leader who inherits a party already worn down by scandal, and then has to ask the country to trust it again.

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• 2. Southampton To Westminster

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  Southampton General Hospital is where Rishi Sunak was born on the 12th of May 1980, the eldest of three children. His parents were Punjabi Hindus born in East Africa, from the Khatri community. His father, born in the Kenya Colony in 1949, became a general practitioner in the National Health Service. His mother was born in the Tanganyika Territory, now Tanzania. She was a pharmacist who owned Sunak Pharmacy in Southampton from 1995 to 2014. Both parents moved to Britain in 1966, and they met there and married in 1977.

  Ramdas Sunak, his paternal grandfather, left Gujranwala for the Kenyan capital Nairobi in 1935. His maternal grandfather, Raghubir Berry, grew up in Ludhiana and later moved to Tanzania as an engineer. Both towns sat in the Punjab province of British India at the time.

  Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, came first. After that Sunak went to Winchester College as a dayboy and rose to become head boy. In the summer holidays he waited tables at Kuti's Brasserie, a curry house in Southampton. During the 2024 election campaign he said his parents wanted to put everything into his education. He also said there was no Sky TV in the house.

  At Lincoln College, Oxford, he read philosophy, politics and economics and graduated with a first in 2001. While at university he did an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party. Goldman Sachs employed him as an analyst from 2001 to 2004. In 2006 he earned a Master of Business Administration degree at Stanford University in California as a Fulbright Scholar.

  The Children's Investment Fund Management employed him from September 2006 to November 2009. He then joined former colleagues in California at Theleme Partners, a new hedge fund that launched in October 2010 with $700 million under management. At both hedge funds he reported directly to Patrick Degorce. From 2013 to 2015 he was also a director of Catamaran Ventures, an investment firm owned by his father-in-law, the Indian businessman N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.

  In October 2014 the Conservatives selected Sunak as their candidate for Richmond (Yorks), a seat previously held by William Hague. That same year he headed the Black and Minority Ethnic Research Unit at the think tank Policy Exchange. He co-wrote a report there on minority communities in the United Kingdom. At the 2015 general election he won the seat with a majority of 19,550, or 36.2 percent.

  The 2016 referendum on European Union membership found him on the winning side, campaigning to leave. He criticised the union's immigration laws, saying: "We are discriminating against countries with whom we have ties of history, language and culture." That year he wrote a report for the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies backing free ports after Brexit. The next year he wrote another urging a retail bond market for small and medium-sized enterprises. After David Cameron resigned, Sunak endorsed Michael Gove for leader. When Gove was eliminated in the second round, he turned to the eventual winner, Theresa May.

  Voters returned him in 2017 with a majority of 23,108, or 40.5 percent. In 2019 the figure rose again to 27,210, or 47.2 percent. In between, May's 2018 reshuffle made him Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government. He voted for her Brexit withdrawal agreement on all three occasions and against a second referendum. Parliament rejected the agreement three times, and in May 2019 May announced her resignation.

  In June 2019 Sunak co-wrote an article with fellow MPs Robert Jenrick and Oliver Dowden backing Boris Johnson's leadership bid. Johnson won and appointed Sunak chief secretary to the Treasury, serving under Sajid Javid. Sunak joined the Privy Council the next day. He also represented the Conservatives in debates during the 2019 general election. His new boss at the Treasury, Javid, would not hold that job for long.

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• 3. Chancellor In A Crisis

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  The 13th of February 2020 was the day of Boris Johnson's first cabinet reshuffle. In the weeks before it, press briefings suggested that a new economic ministry led by Sunak might be created. Such a ministry would reduce the power and political influence of the Treasury. By February it was reported that Javid would stay as chancellor and Sunak would remain chief secretary, in order to "keep an eye" on him.

  Javid then met Johnson. According to the account in the source, Johnson offered to let him keep his post if he dismissed all his Treasury advisers. Those advisers would be replaced by people chosen by 10 Downing Street. Javid told the Press Association that "no self-respecting minister would accept those terms". He resigned, and Sunak was promoted to chancellor later that day.

  The first confirmed COVID-19 cases arrived in January 2020. By late March, with the virus spreading rapidly, Sunak had become prominent in the government's response to the pandemic and its economic impact. On the 20th of March 2020 he gave a statement on COVID-19. "Now, more than any time in our history, we will be judged by our capacity for compassion," he said. He added that the country should remember how it acted with decency, in what he called a generation-defining moment.

  That same day he introduced the Coronavirus Job Retention furlough scheme. It paid grants to employers covering 80 percent of a worker's wage and employment costs each month, up to £2,500 per person. The cost was estimated at £14 billion a month. It was the first time a British government had created an employee retention scheme of this kind. Alongside it came a programme of £330 billion in emergency support for businesses.

  The furlough scheme first ran for three months and was backdated to the 1st of March. After the lockdown was extended by three weeks, Sunak extended the scheme to the end of June 2020. At the end of May he pushed it on to the end of October 2020. In March 2021 he extended it once more, to September 2021. The aim was to avoid or defer mass redundancies, company bankruptcies and unemployment on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

  In July 2020 Sunak unveiled a further £30 billion of spending. It included a stamp duty holiday, a cut in value-added tax for the hospitality sector, a job retention bonus for employers and a scheme called Eat Out to Help Out. Under that scheme the government subsidised food and soft drinks at participating cafes, pubs and restaurants by 50 percent, up to £10 per person. It ran from the 3rd to the 31st of August, Monday to Wednesday each week. In total it subsidised £849 million in meals.

  Verdicts on Eat Out to Help Out split. Some considered it a success in boosting the hospitality industry, while others disagreed. A 2020 study found that it contributed to a rise in COVID-19 infection. Johnson acknowledged that finding, but the Treasury rejected it. Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the government's medical advisers, were not told about the scheme. Vallance later told the COVID-19 Inquiry that Sunak had not informed them until the announcement. Sunak's written evidence said the scheme had been discussed with the medical advisers, including Vallance, and that they had not objected.

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• 4. Budgets And Breaking Point

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  Sunak presented his first budget, Delivering on Our Promises to the British People, on the 11th of March 2020. Another was planned for the autumn. In September 2020 he scrapped it, saying "now is not the right time to outline long-term plans , people want to see us focused on the here and now". Instead he gave additional statements in the summer and autumn.

  The Winter Economy Plan arrived on the 24th of September 2020. It aimed to promote economic recovery while preserving jobs and businesses considered viable. After a second lockdown in England on the 31st of October 2020, the programme was extended several times, until the 30th of September 2021.

  The summer statement of the 8th of July 2020 was nicknamed the coronavirus mini-budget. HM Revenue and Customs and the Institute for Fiscal Studies raised concerns about its impact and cost-effectiveness. At least one major retailer declined to use the bonus scheme meant to reward employers for rehiring furloughed staff.

  By the March 2021 budget the pandemic's damage was plain. Sunak noted that 700,000 people had lost their jobs. The economy had shrunk by 10 percent, the largest fall in 300 years, and borrowing was the highest outside wartime. The budget raised corporation tax from 19 percent to 25 percent in 2023 and froze the personal allowance and the higher-rate income tax threshold for five years. Sunak was the first chancellor to raise the corporation tax rate since Labour's Denis Healey in 1974.

  In October 2021 he delivered his third budget. It raised Universal Credit work allowances by £500 a year and cut the taper rate from 63 percent to 55 percent. It also included £560 million for the Levelling Up White Paper. Much of it was previewed before budget day, which drew anger in the House of Commons. Sunak replied that the budget "begins the work of preparing for a new economy". His final budget came on the 23rd of March 2022. It cut fuel duty, removed VAT on energy saving equipment such as solar panels and insulation, and cut national insurance for small businesses. He also promised a reduction in income tax in 2024.

  On the international stage, Sunak hosted a G7 summit in London in June 2021. The meeting produced a tax reform agreement that in principle sought a global minimum tax on multinationals and online technology companies. In October 2021 the OECD signed an accord to join the plan. Later that month he attended COP26 in Glasgow. On the 3rd of November he said he felt optimism despite daunting challenges.

  By May 2022 the cost of living and an energy crisis dominated the news. Sunak announced a £5 billion windfall tax on energy companies to help fund a £15 billion support package. Every household would receive a £400 discount on energy bills, on top of a £150 council tax refund already ordered. About 8 million of the lowest income households were promised a further £650. Pensioners and disabled people would qualify for extra payments too.

  On the 5th of July 2022, Sunak and Javid resigned almost simultaneously. The trigger was the scandal over sexual harassment allegations against Chris Pincher. It emerged that Johnson had promoted Pincher to Deputy Chief Whip while knowing of the allegations. Sunak was the second of 61 Conservative MPs to resign during the crisis. Nadhim Zahawi succeeded him as chancellor. Within 24 hours, 36 MPs had resigned from government roles and Johnson had announced his own resignation.

  Sunak's resignation letter said: "The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously." He added that he recognised this might be his last ministerial job. Before the year was out, he would hold the highest one.

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• 5. Seizing Number Ten

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  On the 8th of July 2022, three days after resigning, Sunak announced his candidacy to replace Johnson. He launched his campaign in a social media video, promising to "restore trust, rebuild the economy and reunite the country". He named his values as "patriotism, fairness, hard work" and pledged to "crack down on gender neutral language". His other promises included tax cuts only once inflation was under control and scrapping the 5 percent VAT rate on household energy for a year. He also proposed a temporary £10 fine for patients who miss GP appointments, a cap on refugee numbers and a tighter definition of asylum.

  By the 20th of July, Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss were the final two candidates. He topped every round of MP voting, winning 137 votes to her 113 in the last one. He attacked her economic plans, saying: "Liz, we have to be honest. Borrowing your way out of inflation isn't a plan, it's a fairytale." A spokesperson warned that she could not fund a support package and £50bn of unfunded, permanent tax cuts together.

  In the membership vote, Truss took 57.4 percent. Sunak offered his support, saying: "It's right we now unite behind the new PM, Liz Truss, as she steers the country through difficult times." He spent her entire premiership on the backbenches. As he had predicted, her mini-budget of the 23rd of September announced large tax cuts and borrowing. It was widely criticised, and after it rapidly led to financial instability it was largely reversed.

  Truss announced her resignation on the 20th of October 2022. On the 22nd, reports said Sunak had the 100 MP supporters needed to stand in the ballot on the 24th. On the 23rd he declared that he would run. Johnson ruled himself out and Penny Mordaunt withdrew, and Sunak was announced as the new leader on the 24th of October.

  Charles III appointed him prime minister on the 25th of October 2022, making him the first British Asian to hold the office. At 42, he was the youngest prime minister since Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, in 1812. In his first speech he said Truss "was not wrong" to want growth and that he "admired her restlessness to create change". He added that "some mistakes were made", and promised to "place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government's agenda".

  His first cabinet named Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Cleverly as Foreign Secretary and Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. Ben Wallace took Defence, and Michael Gove became Levelling Up Secretary. Dominic Raab returned as deputy prime minister and Justice Secretary, and was replaced by Oliver Dowden after resigning in April 2023. The February 2023 reshuffle created new departments for Business and Trade, Energy Security and Net Zero, and Science, Innovation and Technology. In November 2023 David Cameron returned to government after seven years away from frontline politics, replacing Cleverly as foreign secretary. Braverman and Thérèse Coffey left government. Laura Trott became chief secretary to the Treasury, the job Sunak once held.

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• 6. Promises And Pressures

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  Five priorities defined Sunak's time in office: halving inflation, growing the economy, cutting debt, reducing National Health Service waiting lists, and stopping small-boat crossings of the English Channel. For that last aim he relied on the Rwanda asylum plan.

  In February 2023 Sunak negotiated a proposed agreement with the European Union on Northern Ireland's trading arrangements, published as the Windsor Framework. On the 27th of February he told the House of Commons it "protects Northern Ireland's place in our Union". On the 22nd of March, the day of the vote, 22 Conservative MPs and six DUP MPs voted against the legislation. It passed by 515 votes to 29.

  The Conservatives had pledged in 2019 to cut net migration below 250,000 a year. In 2023 Sunak said his priority was not reducing legal immigration but stopping illegal immigration. Nearly 30,000 undocumented migrants crossed the Channel in small boats that year. Long-term net migration hit a record 764,000 in 2022, with 1.26 million arriving and 493,000 leaving. Of the 1,218,000 legal migrants who came in 2023, only 10 percent were EU nationals.

  In June 2023 the Court of Appeal blocked the Rwanda plan over concerns about international law and refoulement, the risk of persecution for those sent there. Sunak vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court. On the 15th of November 2023 the Supreme Court upheld the ruling and declared the plan unlawful. Sunak sent Cleverly to Rwanda to negotiate a treaty aimed at preventing refoulement.

  The government also introduced the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill. This emergency legislation let ministers disapply sections of the Human Rights Act 1998 so they could declare Rwanda safe under UK law. Many on the right of the party said it did not go far enough, and immigration minister Robert Jenrick resigned. On the 12th of December 2023 Sunak secured a government majority of 44 for the bill. Every other party opposed it, and some members of the European Research Group abstained.

  On Ukraine, Sunak met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and pledged £50 million in aid. He said he was "proud of how the UK stood with Ukraine from the very beginning". On the 12th of January 2024 he visited Ukraine to sign a security cooperation agreement. It promised £2.5 billion in military aid, including long-range missiles, artillery ammunition, air defence and maritime security. A further £200 million was set aside for military drones. Downing Street said this made Britain the largest deliverer of drones to Ukraine of any nation.

  In October 2023 Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that grew into a war and a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Sunak declared that Israel "has an absolute right to defend itself". He backed humanitarian pauses to bring in aid but at first rejected a full ceasefire, arguing it would only benefit Hamas. Israel used British-supplied weapons. Sunak later condemned the high civilian casualties and called for a "sustainable ceasefire", while his government supported a two-state solution. When International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan said he would seek charges against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sunak called the move "unhelpful".

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• 7. Defeat And Aftermath

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  The 4th of May 2023 was Sunak's first local election as leader, and the Conservatives suffered heavy losses. On the 20th of July they lost two by-election seats, one to Labour and one to the Liberal Democrats. Shelving the northern phase of HS2 in October did not change their fortunes. They lost two more seats in by-elections on the 15th of February 2024.

  In March 2024 there was talk of a leadership challenge if the party did badly in the local elections on the 2nd of May. Sunak said he would resist one. The results were the party's worst in local elections since 1996. They also lost the Blackpool South by-election to Labour and narrowly lost the West Midlands mayoral election. His premiership was described as more stable than those of his two predecessors, though not a turnaround.

  On the afternoon of the 22nd of May 2024, Sunak said he had asked the King to call a general election for the 4th of July. It surprised his own MPs. He could have waited until December 2024. He said he chose the date because he believed the economy was improving, and that falling inflation and net migration would reinforce the message of "sticking to the plan".

  The manifesto, Clear Plan. Bold Action. Secure Future., came out on the 11th of June. The campaign stressed stabilising the economy, the Rwanda plan, strengthening the State Pension and introducing National Service. Sunak said that if his party lost, he intended to stay on as a backbench MP for the next 5 years. On the 6th of June, the 80th anniversary of D-Day, he left commemoration events early to do an interview with ITV. Veterans were among those who criticised him, and he apologised three times over the following week.

  Labour won a landslide on the 4th of July, ending 14 years of Conservative government. A record number of Conservative MPs stood down or lost their seats. Three cabinet members stood down. Eight full members and four who attended cabinet lost their seats, the most sitting cabinet losses in history. Sunak himself held the new seat of Richmond and Northallerton with a majority of 23,059.

  He conceded on the 5th of July. In his resignation speech he said: "I am sorry that we could not deliver what your efforts deserved." He announced he would step down as leader once the arrangements for choosing a successor were in place. He also called incoming prime minister Keir Starmer "a decent, public-spirited man" whom he respected.

  Sunak became Leader of the Opposition at once and formed his shadow cabinet on the 8th of July. Jeremy Hunt became shadow chancellor and James Cleverly shadow home secretary. David Cameron chose to retire from frontline politics, so Andrew Mitchell became shadow foreign secretary. Oliver Dowden became deputy leader of the opposition, and Kemi Badenoch took the housing brief. Sunak led until Badenoch won the leadership election, then returned to the backbenches. He said his party would not oppose the government "for the sake of it". On the Rwanda plan, he warned that without an alternative deterrent "a large number of those who crossed the Channel illegally will end up remaining here".

  In January 2025 Sunak became a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He also became a distinguished fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government and signed with the Washington Speakers Bureau. In March 2025 he and his wife founded a charity, The Richmond Project, to improve numeracy among schoolchildren and adults. In July 2025 he became a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs, where the advisory committee ACOBA restricted him for a year from lobbying the government. In October 2025 he became a paid adviser to Microsoft and the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic. He said he would donate his earnings from those roles to a charity he had founded.

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• 8. Scrutiny And Image

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  Euronews has described Sunak as "frequently perceived as a pragmatist and as belonging to the centre-ground of the Conservative Party". Others see a technocratic or managerial style. He opposed Truss's economic policies and, though also called a Thatcherite, is seen as less economically liberal than she was. In April 2023 Jessica Elgot of The Guardian called him "perhaps the most socially conservative PM of his generation". Three months later The Economist called him "the most right-wing Conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher".

  In the early weeks of the pandemic, his ratings were described by one analyst as "better ratings than any politician since the heydays of Tony Blair". An Ipsos MORI poll in September 2020 gave him the highest satisfaction score of any chancellor since Denis Healey in April 1978. Social media and magazines were full of jokes about his looks, and he picked up the nickname "Dishy Rishi".

  The affection faded. By early 2022 the cost of living was a growing public concern, and his response was seen as inadequate. His approval ratings reached some of their lowest points, as scrutiny of the family's finances grew. They recovered slightly by his resignation as chancellor and rose again when he became prime minister. By his resignation as prime minister in July 2024 they were the lowest yet. After the election he won praise for being gracious in defeat, and some commentators suggested the Conservatives keep him as leader.

  Akshata Murty, daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy and the author Sudha Murty, is the other half of that scrutiny. She and Sunak met while studying at Stanford and married in August 2009. He proposed on a cliff near the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay. They have two daughters, born in 2011 and 2013. In November 2020 The Guardian reported that Sunak had not declared a significant amount of his wife's family interests, including a combined £1.7 billion shareholding in Infosys. The independent adviser on ministers' interests found he had broken no rules.

  In early 2022 newspapers reported that Murty had non-domiciled status. It meant she did not have to pay tax on income earned abroad while living in the UK. Securing it cost about £30,000 and allowed her to avoid an estimated £20 million in UK taxes. On the 8th of April she said she would pay UK tax on her global income and regretted that the issue had become "a distraction for her husband". Reporting also revealed that Sunak had held a United States green card until 2021, including for 18 months after becoming chancellor. An investigation found he had broken no ministerial rules.

  In April 2022 police issued Sunak a fixed penalty notice over a birthday gathering for Boris Johnson on the 19th of June 2020. The police also issued 125 notices to 82 other individuals, including Johnson and his wife Carrie Symonds. Sunak said he was "extremely and sincerely sorry". In January 2023 Lancashire Constabulary fined him after a social media video showed him not wearing a seat belt in a moving vehicle. After Johnson, he was the second prime minister found to have broken the law in office. He called it a "brief error of judgment".

  The couple live in Kirby Sigston, near Northallerton, North Yorkshire. They also own a mews house in Earl's Court, a flat on Old Brompton Road in South Kensington and a penthouse on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California. In April 2022 they moved out of the flat above 10 Downing Street to a refurbished west London home. In October 2022 they returned to No 10 as prime minister, reversing a trend begun in 1997 of prime ministers using the four-bedroom flat above No 11. In August 2023 the family slipped away for 10 days in Santa Monica, Sunak's first holiday in almost four years. They visited the pier and Disneyland, and attended a concert of The Eras Tour by Taylor Swift.

  Sunak is a teetotaller. In 2022 he said he had seven dental fillings from drinking too much Coca-Cola when younger, and he prefers Mexican Coke. He has a Labrador called Nova and enjoys cricket and horse racing. As chancellor he rose early for a daily Peloton workout and admired the instructor Cody Rigsby. His close friend James Forsyth, a former political editor of The Spectator, has known him since school. Sunak was best man at Forsyth's wedding to the journalist Allegra Stratton, and they are godparents to each other's children. He made Forsyth his political secretary in December 2022.

  Asked what his ideal job would be if he were not a politician, Sunak said that running Southampton Football Club would make him a "very happy man". He has supported the club of his home city for years.

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