A gilded exile in California in his house worth over 7 million dollars. Is this the destiny Rishi Sunak? The first prime minister of Indian origin, the 44-year-old is also the youngest modern-day occupant of Downing Street, where he has lived with his wife and two daughters since being appointed in October 2022. The third child of professional Hindu immigrants who came to the UK from East Africa, Sunak attended the prestigious boarding school of Winchester College, before moving on to Oxford University and finally Stanford University in California.
And in this election campaign that has been doomed to defeat from the start – according to the sensational polls – for the Tories, there have been many rumours about the prime minister’s alleged plans to retire to California, where he has a house in Santa Monica and deep ties. Rumours repeatedly denied by the person concerned, who assures that even in defeat he will “certainly” remain in the United Kingdom on the opposition benches in the Commons. Denials aside, Sunak has never made a secret of his deep ties to California where he studied, met his wife and ran a hedge fund in Santa Monica before returning to the UK to enter politics.
His wife, Akshata Murty, is an entrepreneur and heiress of a very rich Indian family that controls the multinational IT company Infosys. An empire that was a source of embarrassment for the prime minister, when it emerged – at the time when Sunak was still a minister – that his wife declared the “non-domiciled tax status” to the tax authorities, which made her resident in the United Kingdom with her main domicile abroad, thus avoiding paying millions of pounds to the British tax authorities. After the scandal, Sunak’s wife said she would start paying taxes on income generated outside the United Kingdom.
Political debut in 2015
Sunak’s political career began in 2015, when he won the Yorkshire seat held by former leader William Hague. He remained a little-known face outside the party until February 2020 when, following the resignation of Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson entrusted him with one of the main government roles. The appointment coincided with the start of the Covid pandemic, which saw Sunak grappling with the financial and economic fallout, appreciated for the measures adopted to support Britons left without work due to the lockdown.
At the time of Johnson’s resignation, overwhelmed by the Partygate scandal, the parties thrown by the government while the British were forced to stay home by the lockdown, Liz Truss was preferred to Sunak, perhaps still due to the negative effects of his wife’s tax scandal, as the new leader and prime minister. But after the government of the Conservative prime minister fell just 45 days after her inauguration, this time the Tories chose Sunak in the hope that he could straighten out the party’s ever-turbulent course before the general election.
The appointment as prime minister and the mistakes of his government
Appointed prime minister in October 2022, Sunak sets five goals that he says voters will judge him on: halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel. Just before calling the July 4 election, the prime minister was able to hit one of these goals, with inflation falling to its lowest level in three years, at 2.3%.
Sunak tried to claim this was a sign that his recipe for the economy was working, but his claims about falling debt were belied by figures showing it was rising, with waiting lists at public hospitals even longer than when he took office.
Not to mention that his controversial plan to deport people to Rwanda, which he said was supposed to deter people from trying to cross the Channel into the UK, not only created a huge wave of controversy and appeals, but was barely implemented before the election. While Home Office figures show a record number of arrivals via the Channel in the first five months of the year, almost 10,000 people, with five deaths, including a 7-year-old girl, in April.
