Rishi Sunak is Britain’s third prime minister in less than two months. What are his chances of success?

He (finally) made it: Rishi Sunak is set to take over as Britain’s prime minister after succeeding in his second attempt to become leader of the country’s ruling Conservative Party.

The 42-year-old will be the first nonwhite occupant of 10 Downing Street, the British leader’s official residence in central London — and the first to be appointed by the newly minted King Charles III.

A former finance minister under Boris Johnson, Sunak will replace Liz Truss, who, in just over a month in office, managed to turn what was a brewing economic storm in the U.K. into a full-blown financial earthquake, triggering panic in the markets as the British pound plummeted to new lows.

Bringing back stability on the economic front will be task No. 1 for Sunak, a multimillionaire former Goldman Sachs banker. But he also faces a series of political challenges as the Conservative Party’s popularity has plunged following Truss’ brief stint in Downing Street, and amid questions about his own currency as a front-line politician.

“He’s never really been tried and tested in the white heat of national politics,” Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London and a leading British political commentator, told Grid. “Yes he was chancellor of the Exchequer [as the finance minister is known in Britain], but he had Boris Johnson there to do the sort of outreach, if you like, to the general public. So it’ll be interesting to see what the public make of Sunak.”

Who is Rishi Sunak? And what may lie ahead for him and for the U.K.? One thing is certain: He takes office at one of the most tumultuous moments in the country’s recent history.

An immigrant success story

Sunak was born to parents of Indian descent who migrated to the U.K. from East Africa in the 1960s. He grew up in the city of Southampton, where his father was a local doctor and his mother, a pharmacist, ran her own chemist shop.

From there, Sunak followed a well-trodden path to British government: Privately educated at Winchester, one of the country’s best-known boarding schools, he went on to the universities of Oxford in Britain and then Stanford in the U.S., and then began a career in finance. A stint at Goldman Sachs was followed by a period in the hedge fund business, including in the U.S., where he met his future wife, the fashion designer Akshata Murthy. She is the daughter of N.R. Narayana Murthy, the billionaire co-founder of the Indian software services giant Infosys. Sunak and Murthy’s combined net worth is estimated at around 730 million pounds, or close to $825 million, making Britain’s new prime minister the richest ever.

The sheer scale of Sunak’s wealth has repeatedly opened him up to the charge of being out of touch with ordinary Britons and the challenges they face.

Those questions and criticisms — his opponents for instance often point to a clip of him as a young university student telling a filmmaker that he had no working-class friends — have come even as his ascent to the country’s top job has been celebrated as the shattering of a glass ceiling — or ceilings. As a practicing Hindu, Sunak brings both ethnic and religious diversity to Britain’s top job, which, as it happens, became his on Diwali, one of the most important festivals in the Hindu religious calendar.

As Barnie Choudhury, editor-at-large at Eastern Eye, a local newspaper focused on British South Asians, told the BBC on Monday morning, Sunak’s victory in the Conservative Party leadership race is a “huge moment” for the community. But, Choudhury added, the criticism may linger that “he is out of touch with reality, because of the privilege that he holds.”

Putting out the economic fire

Central to Sunak’s pitch for the Conservative leadership was the background that also helped make him rich: his experience in the world of high finance. That experience, Sunak has said often, can only help him and the country at a time when the stability of Britain’s financial system has been called into question. As Grid has reported, Truss’ policies led not only to a loss of faith among analysts and investors, but even to warnings from the International Monetary Fund about the fragility of the financial architecture that underpins Britain’s economy. Running against Truss in the summer campaign, Sunak had sounded the alarm about Truss’ plans — in particular the wide-ranging but unfunded tax cuts she ultimately announced in September. During the campaign, Sunak said Truss’ numbers wouldn’t “add up” and that they amounted to an economic “fairy tale.”

The remarks may have seemed harsh at the time; two months later, they look prescient.

Although most of Truss’ initiatives have now been rolled back, Sunak inherits what is a grave and worsening economic challenge. Truss’ policies, and their destabilizing effects on the markets, have already started to hit the wallets of ordinary Britons, thanks to a rise in mortgage rates. Inflation, meanwhile, is galloping north, a trend made worse by recent declines in the value of the British pound. There is also the fallout from the covid-19 pandemic, which has weakened swathes of the British public sector, and from Brexit, which has hit trade with Europe, the country’s biggest trading partner. All this as Britain tries to contain the impact of the war in Ukraine, which has caused a sharp uptick in energy costs for ordinary people.

To ensure that the markets don’t suffer a fresh panic, Sunak is expected to propose a series of cuts to public spending. The idea: balance the books in a way that helps calm the nerves of investors who, under Truss, sold down the pound. The precise details are expected soon — by the end of the month — but Sunak must walk a tricky tightrope: Cut too deep, and he could make things harder for ordinary Britons who depend on public services; cut too little, and he could face a revolt by the markets.

Rescuing his party

Deep cuts to Britain’s public services could also worsen the political standing of Sunak’s Conservative Party, which in recent weeks has seen its poll ratings in near free fall. As it stands today, the opposition Labour Party is on a clear track to win the next national election, due to be held no later than January 2025.

Can Sunak turn things around? The answer is: We really don’t know — at least not yet. He is going to Downing Street only because of the backing of Conservative lawmakers, not ordinary members; he has never overseen a national campaign, and he is not viewed as the most charismatic performer on the stump.

“My doubt about Sunak is that I’m not sure how political he is,” Menon, from King’s College, told Grid. “I’ve never had the sense he has that visceral understanding of the political mood that really good politicians bring with them to the job.”

Yes, Sunak will be seen as a “relatively safe pair of hands” by investors and economists, Menon added. But polling at the end of last week showed that “he would still lose” in a national contest with Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party.

So much has changed in Britain in such a short time (we haven’t even mentioned the death of Queen Elizabeth II) that imagining the future for Sunak and his party is nearly impossible at the moment. He has the luxury of following in the footsteps of perhaps the most disastrous tenure of any British prime minister, and of course some early wins on the economic side will help on the political front.

But for the moment, there is a long list of ifs and uncertainties. And for the moment, Menon said, as Sunak takes over, “it is very, very hard where we are now to imagine Labour not becoming at a minimum the largest party at the next election.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.