NEW DELHI: Rishi Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton, Hampshire, South East England, to Indian parents Yashvir and Usha Sunak, who were born in Kenya and Tanzania respectively. While Rishi’s father was a general practitioner, his mother was a pharmacist who ran a medical store.
Rishi’s grandparents were born in Punjab Province, British India, and emigrated to the UK in the 1960s from East Africa. Rishi is the eldest of three siblings. His brother Sanjay is a psychologist and his sister Rakhi works as the Head of Humanitarian, Peacebuilding, UN Funds and Programmes at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
Rishi Sunak tied the knot with Akshata Murthy in August 2009. The couple has two daughters. His wife is the daughter of Indian billionaire N R Narayana Murthy, and serves as the director at Catamaran Ventures.
She also runs her own fashion label and is among the wealthiest women in Britain. An alumnus of Winchester College, Lincoln College, Oxford and Stanford Universities, Rishi, during his summer holidays, waited tables at a curry house in Southampton.
He undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters while at the university. From 2001 to 2004, he worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank. He left the job to join The Children’s Investment Fund Management and became a partner in the firm in September 2006. He joined another hedge fund firm Theleme Partners in 2009.
Rishi began his political career in 2014 and was chosen as the Conservative candidate for Richmond (Yorks), a seat that was previously been held by William Hague. The seat has been held by the Conservative Party for over 100 years now. That year, he headed the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Research Unit of Policy Exchange and co-wrote a report on BME communities in the United Kingdom. In the 2015 polls, he was elected as an MP from Richmond (Yorks). From 2015 to 2017, he served as a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee.
He supported the EU referendum in 2016. He was re-elected as MP from the same seat in the 2017. He served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary from January 2018 to July 2019. He supported PM Boris Johnson in the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election. Rishi was re-elected in 2019 polls and was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury by Johnson in July 2019 and served under Chancellor Sajid Javid. He became a member of the Privy Council on 25 July 2019.
After a reshuffle in February 2020, Rishi was promoted to Chancellor of the Exchequer. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Rishi presented his first budget on 11 March 2020. Rishi announced £30 billion of additional spending of which £12 billion was allocated for mitigation of the economic impact of the pandemic.