Rishi Sunak: A Historic Yet Controversial Tenure As Britain's PM

A few months ago, a meme starring British prime minister Rishi Sunak was being shared widely on social media. Hair slicked back, feet shod in pricey shoes, Sunak was standing at a train station, gazing at a train with a somewhat mystified expression on his face. The caption of the meme read: “So this is what people take when their helicopters break down?” Memes are not to be taken seriously of course. But this one did make a point: the Conservative politician’s policy decisions have almost always been out-of-touch with the concerns of marginalised immigrants and working-class families in the UK.  

Sunak made history when he became the first person of Indian descent to take office as the British prime minister in 2022. There was much jubilation in the Indian diaspora, and among Indians in the motherland. Though Sunak’s elevation marked a milestone, members of the Conservative Party pushed for some of the harshest policies in British history regarding immigration, asylum seekers, and civil society protests under Sunak’s watch. While on the campaign trail, Sunak, who is a British national, would take pains to remind voters about his immigrant origins—referring to his African-born parents who are of Indian-Punjabi descent. Every campaign video his team sent out into the world highlighted it. But Sunak as PM, like his contemporaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, remained a minority ethnic politician who espouses tough policies that hurt minority communities.    

Reams have been written about Sunak’s personal and political trajectory. We know his grandparents emigrated from Punjab to East Africa. His parents were born in Africa. They met in Southampton after their families moved to England. His mother owned a small pharmacy and his father worked as a GP for the National Health Service. As a young boy, Sunak used to help his mother keep the books in her pharmacy. As a fledgling politico, he would often refer to the experience he gained from working there and invoke Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative powerhouse--the daughter of a grocer who went on to become UK’s first woman prime minister. It is worth noting that Thatcher was in the habit of declaring '‘there is no alternative’’ (to capitalism) and that “there is no society...only individual men and women and families” exist.   

*** 

Sunak attended Winchester College, an exclusive private school. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. During his student years at Oxford, Sunak interned at the headquarters of the Conservative Party. Post his graduation, he worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before going on to pursue an MBA at Stanford University. He met his future wife, Akshata Murthy, daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy at Stanford. In 2010, Sunak started working for the Conservative Party and four years later, became the party’s candidate for the House of Commons from Richmond. 

Elected in 2015 with a sizeable majority, Sunak was strongly in favour of Theresa May’s Brexit dream. In 2018, he was appointed undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Housing, his first ministerial post. A vocal supporter of Boris Johnson at that time, he was promoted to chief secretary to the Treasury in July 2019 when Johnson became prime minister. When Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid resigned in 2020, Johnson appointed Sunak as his replacement.

Then came Covid-19. Sunak’s department devoted an emergency fund of about 400 billion USD to affected businesses and workers. His popularity rose. He also launched the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ plan to keep restaurants going. Though it had its share of supporters, many criticised it, alleging it had caused a rise in Covid cases in the UK and ignored warnings from scientific advisors.  

In 2022, when Boris Johnson was buffeted by crises, Sunak resigned from the cabinet. There were two candidates vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party after Johnson's fall: Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. Truss became party chief, but her stint was a blink-it-and-you-miss-it affair. She was gone in six weeks. Sunak took over the Party leadership when support for the Conservatives was running very low. In March 2023, he managed to pass the ‘Windsor Framework’, a post-Brexit trade deal; and later in the year, he dropped home secretary Suella Braverman from the cabinet, and paved the way for former PM David Cameron's return as foreign secretary. All this while, pollsters (unreliable as their tribe may be), kept reporting that the fortunes of the Conservative Party were tanking, and Labour was gaining ground. However, in May 2024, a seemingly unruffled Sunak announced that general elections in the UK would be held in July 2024.  

Politics is a notoriously fickle business. Fall from grace is swift, faces are easily forgotten. But political legacies do have a habit of living on. Whatever the result of this general election turns out to be, the ‘Rwanda bill’, which many human rights groups have termed a breach of international law; and the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act passed by the Conservative government, are bound to be chalked up as Sunak’s legacy. The Rwanda bill allows “illegal” asylum seekers coming to the UK to be sent to Rwanda in east-central Africa, and their asylum claims to be processed in Rwanda, not in the UK. The UK Supreme Court had not been in favour of this plan, pointing out that Rwanda is not a safe destination for refugees. The PCSC Act grants the police greater powers to regulate public protests, crack down on civil society protests and to sentence protestors.