If he wins the race for No 10, the 42-year-old will be the first black to become UK prime minister and the first Hindu, in a historic break with the past. Yet in other ways his story is as established as: private school, PPE at Oxford, the City, the Tory party. He was born in Southampton, where he and his family still provide a meal once a year for local worshipers at the Hindu temple co-founded by Sunak’s grandfather, Ramdas Sunak, in 1971 – shortly after he emigrated from India with his wife and their son. , Sunak’s father Yas. During this year’s visit in July, the then chancellor was meeting a group of young children, aged four to nine, when someone asked: “Are you prime minister?” “We all burst out laughing,” said Sanjay Chandarana, temple president of the Vedic Society. “I don’t remember what [Sunak] he said particularly, but there was obviously a smile on his face.’ It was an apt question. Sunak resigned as chancellor 48 hours later, helping to set off a dramatic chain of events that forced Boris Johnson from Downing Street. There was “no indication at all” that Sunak thought of giving up, said Chadarana, who spent nearly five hours with him. Sunak offered the prayers with his wife, Aksatha Murthy, their daughters, Krishna and Anushka, and his parents. “He just came as a normal person – nobody realized he was there – he just went and sat on the floor among everyone when the prayers were being said. The next thing she went to the kitchen and made chapattis,” Chandarana said, adding that they were “perfectly round” and “we joked that she must be cooking at home”. Sunak is accompanied by his wife, Akshata Murty, and daughters during his campaign for the Tory leadership last month. Photo: Danny Lawson/PA Sunak’s roots may be here at the local church, but his confidence and polish, which have seen him finish in the bottom two in the bitter Conservative leadership race, are exactly what his parents hoped they were buying when they saved up for him. sent to Winchester – one of England’s leading private schools. “You can see his success. You get an education, you get a good job, you get respect, you rise in status and things get easier,” his mother, Usha, a pharmacist, told a BBC documentary in 2001. With his easy-going manner and willingness to work hard, Sunak became head boy and won a place at Lincoln College, Oxford. He said in the same documentary – filmed in his final year at university – “it puts me in an elite of achievers certainly in society, but I will always consider myself a professional middle class”. One of his economics professors at Oxford, who preferred not to be named, praised the young Sunak as “a very mature undergraduate”. They said: “He was a really excellent student. He was very interested, very eager to understand, cared about things and worked hard. He really couldn’t be a better student. He listened, absorbed things, asked good questions.” His former teacher says he was “very surprised” when Sunak appeared years later on Newsnight – and “probably shocked” he was there to talk about Boris Johnson, having shown little political inclination in his student days. While he may not have been aiming for No.10, Sunak seems determined to make a big buck. He joined an investment club at Oxford University, which hosted talks by City luminaries – and landed a postgraduate job at Goldman Sachs. Sunak never became much more than a junior member of the financial firms he joined and, when he became chancellor in 2020, the Guardian struggled to find many people in the City who had met him. This is perhaps not surprising, as Sunak had given up finance by the time he reached his 30s. He left Goldman Sachs to do an MBA at Stanford in the US between 2004 and 2006, where he met his wife, Murty, daughter of NR Narayana Murthy (Akshata dropped the ‘h’), the billionaire founder of global IT company Infosys. . He owns almost 1% of the company’s shares. In addition to finding a fabulously wealthy husband, Sunak discovered key aspects of his political philosophy during his time in California. As he told American venture capital journalist Harry Stebbings of his time at Stanford: “In addition to the appreciation of the weather, it is also a home of entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation, and those are probably the most important ways to be out there in The US has changed my life in terms of the trajectory I was on.” It was then back to the less heady climate of the City of London, before he and Murthy tied the knot in what was billed as the “Bangalore wedding of the year” in August 2009. Friends from Stanford gathered alongside some of its richest tycoons and stars. India the world of sports. However, despite the stellar guest list, many observers noted that the ‘big fat Bangalore wedding’ was almost average by Indian standards. Murty wore “minimal and basic jewellery”, said a media report, perhaps in keeping with her parents’ “almost ascetic” lifestyle, despite their vast wealth. That same year Sunak moved to the US to work, before finally leaving for politics in 2013. In another of his immaculately produced campaign videos, Sunak’s predecessor as MP for Richmond, North Yorkshire, William Hague, describes the selection meeting at which Sunak was selected as a candidate, when hundreds of local members gathered to cast their eyes on the hopefuls. “A farmer would be good, or a military man, some of them ran down the street. We need a local candidate, said others, or obviously they should come from Yorkshire, that’s a given.” But it was Sunak, with his combination of private school polish and the big ambitions he acquired at Stanford, who won the nomination. Sunak campaign video Haig then remembers him working tirelessly to keep the Tory seat. Footage from the era shows Sunak listening earnestly to farmers in flat hats and helping with the early morning milking – always immaculately and expensively dressed. In 2015, Sunak and Murty bought a £1.5 million mansion in the ancient settlement of Kirby Sigston in his constituency. His daughters are sometimes seen riding ponies around their Grade II-listed home and playing with local children when they visit. Sunaks garden parties are one of the hottest tickets in town. They’ve been known to spill over on feasts with roast venison, canapés and champagne – but most gatherings are less extravagant. “They’ve got a nice house with a lawn that leads onto a little pond and we get together there and drink tea and chat,” said Carl Less, the Conservative leader of North Yorkshire County Council. Sunak arrived in the House of Commons in 2015 as David Cameron secured a surprise majority after five years in coalition with the Lib Dems – and having tentatively promised an in/out referendum on what became known as Brexit. In his maiden speech, Sunak declared his belief in “a compassionate Britain, which provides opportunity and values freedom”. Eleftheria emerged again when, eight months later, he explained to his local papers, the Yorkshire Post and the Darlington & Stockton Times, that despite the support of his former mentors Cameron and Hague still remaining, he was glowing in favor of Brexit. “To me, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our country to take back control of its destiny. Of course, leaving will bring some uncertainty, but overall I believe our nation will be freer, fairer and more prosperous outside the EU,” he said. Sunak won his first junior cabinet post in January 2018 when the embattled Theresa May carried out an ill-advised reshuffle. A long-time Tory special adviser who worked with him at the time said he “grasped a very difficult policy brief very quickly” but showed he was a workaholic. “It’s a bit of a problem,” they said. “I’ve never met a minister in my life who works until 2 in the morning.” Another person who has seen how Sunak works said it was “basically like working for a banker”. Having made a winning political bet with Brexit, Sunak made another when May’s troubled premiership finally collapsed. Along with Oliver Dowden and Robert Jenrick he came out early and backed Boris Johnson to be the next Conservative leader. “The Tories are in great danger. Only Boris Johnson can save us,’ was the headline in a Times article written by the ambitious trio, who all went on to hold senior posts in Johnson’s first government. Sunak became chief secretary to the Treasury in July 2019. Just seven months later he was thrust into the chancellorship when Sajid Javid resigned in disgust rather than accept a plan drawn up by Dominic Cummings in which Javid’s special advisers would they were replacing a team that shared with No.10. Sunack sits in the Tory front row during his tenure as chief secretary to the Treasury in October 2019. Picture: House of Commons/Jessica Taylor/PA He came into office at an extraordinary time, as the gravity of the Covid pandemic slowly began to dawn on Downing Street. Within weeks, Johnson was urging the public to stay at home and Sunak was announcing his multibillion-pound furlough scheme. An official who worked with him praised his ability to grasp the scale of the situation. “It shifted gears and realized it before the rest of the system, and it pushed and pushed the system to think more radically about what you could do in this kind of environment,” they said. Mark Harper, the former chief whip who was an early supporter of Sunak, said: “What it says to me about his character is that if you throw an emergency into…
