Rishi Sunak is set to become Britain’s next prime minister after months of turbulence, The Guardian reports.
Sunak won the race on Monday to leave the ruling party, the Conservative Party. He will be the third prime minister in the U.K. in less than two months.
Sunak takes the reigns at a massively turbulent time in the U.K. He will need to steer a deeply divided country through an economic downturn set to leave millions of people poorer.
Rishi Sunak will make history as the first prime minister of color.
Liz Truss stepped down as Prime Minister, only lasting 44 days before her resignation. Sunak is tasked with needing to restore stability to a country reeling from years of political and economic turmoil.
The Conservative party has been in power for 12 years. Sunak will have to work hard to hold Britain’s dominant political party together after some accused him of treachery earlier this year when he resigned from the cabinet of former leader Boris Johnson, triggering a wider rebellion within the party.
It is one of the toughest downturns for Britain in decades.
He is also one of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster. His personal wealth, as well as his wife’s, was a point of contention. He was scrutinized heavily over tax arrangements of his wife Akshata Morty, the daughter of an Indian billionaire. Sunak and Murty were on the Sunday Times Rich List of the wealthiest 250 people in the U.K. earlier this year. Their wealth is estimated at about $826 million.
The multi-millionaire former hedge fund boss will be expected to launch deep spending cuts to attempt to rebuild the country’s fiscal reputation.
The U.K. is sliding in to a recession, dragged down by the surging cost of energy and food.
He told Conservative lawmakers in Westminster the party needed to tackle Britain’s economic challenges after political turbulence hit borrowing costs and pushed mortgage rates higher.
Some have accused Sunak of being too rich to understand the day-to-day economic pressures building in the U.K.
Sunak is likely to be appointed prime minister by King Charles on Tuesday.
Polls show that the majority of people in the U.K. want a general election. Labour has held record leads in opinion polls of more than 25 points ever since Truss’s budget sent shockwaves through financial markets.
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