Rishi Sunak

Born in Southampton in 1980 to Indian parents who had come to Britain from East Africa, Sunak studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, then earned an MBA at Stanford as a Fulbright Scholar before working at Goldman Sachs and later as a hedge fund partner. He entered Parliament in 2015, backed Brexit in 2016, and climbed quickly through junior roles to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020. His pandemic-era furlough scheme and Eat Out to Help Out won him early popularity, but approval cratered during the 2022 cost-of-living crisis. He resigned that July during a government meltdown, lost the leadership race to Liz Truss, then won unopposed seven weeks later when her premiership collapsed. As prime minister from October 2022, Sunak set five priorities - halving inflation, growing the economy, cutting debt, clearing NHS backlogs, stopping Channel crossings - and backed Ukraine and Israel abroad. None of it arrested the Conservative slide: he called a surprise July 2024 election and Labour demolished his party, ending 14 years of Tory rule.