The coronavirus chancellor: how Rishi Sunak took centre stage

In the world beyond the wood-panelled state dining room of No 10 Downing Street, the pound was crashing, companies were closing, streets were emptying and one of London’s biggest hospitals had run out of critical care beds. Yet inside, an almost surreal calm seemed to surround the man charged with preventing coronavirus from turning into an economic catastrophe.

Rishi Sunak, Britain’s recently installed chancellor of the exchequer, checked his notes before calmly running through the “unprecedented” measures he intended to take.

A trim figure in a dark suit, white shirt and burgundy tie, Sunak had already allocated tens of billions of pounds to save ailing businesses, but his new approach had never been tried before, even in wartime: “For the first time in our history, our government is going to pay people’s wages,” he told the nation.

Sunak’s “whatever it takes” message on March 20 won glowing reviews from the media and political opponents alike, as did the soothing manner in which he delivered it. “We want to look back on this time and remember how we thought first of others and acted with decency,” he said. Beyond the admiration for the scale of the chancellor’s response was a more fundamental question: who was this preternaturally assured politician?

Rishi Sunak is still a few weeks away from his 40th birthday, yet finds himself at the centre of Britain’s most acute economic — and human — crisis since the financial crash, perhaps since the second world war. He has been an MP for less than five years and just a year ago he was the most junior minister in the local government department.

Until his appointment as chancellor on February 13 — following the dramatic resignation of his friend and then-boss Sajid Javid — he had not run a government department.

Few people saw Sunak coming, but at that tense coronavirus press conference in 10 Downing Street, there was a collective realisation that the prime minister’s podium might well be where he was eventually heading. The press was cruel in drawing comparisons between the sleek chancellor and the ever-rumpled figure of Boris Johnson, who stood alongside him and has struggled to explain the government’s sluggish initial response to the virus. Ladbrokes makes Sunak hot favourite to be the next prime minister.

“He is smart, he’s energetic and he listens, which is important,” says Frances O’Grady, head of the TUC, Britain’s trade union movement. O’Grady would not normally be a fan of a Tory chancellor, but several days of negotiating with Sunak over the coronavirus jobs package won her over: “It’s a lot of responsibility on young shoulders.

“What I would say is that he does have emotional intelligence. It’s a different style, without that sense of superiority that some have. He is quite frank in saying he never expected he would be in this position; this is not Conservatism as we have known it for 40 years. Things are happening really fast, judgments are being made fast.” 

Carolyn Fairbairn, head of the CBI employers’ federation, also became an admirer over cups of tea at the Treasury: “We all just felt that incredible relief. He showed that you can come together and do things that are big and have the potential to change the course of the river.”

Sunak has risen so fast that he has barely had time to acquire enemies, but the future could be trickier. “He won’t be so popular when we’re putting up taxes again to fix this,” admits one Treasury insider. He remains vulnerable to the whims of Johnson and his team and will inevitably become a marked man for his rivals. But for now, he has ridden a vertiginous trajectory to the top level of British politics.

Sunak’s rise blindsided many people. He is not a sociable figure in the Conservative parliamentary party: few MPs can recall seeing him working the tea rooms like other ambitious colleagues.

A teetotaller, he is more likely to end a long day in Westminster at home with his family than late-night gossiping over dinner. At heart, Sunak is a nerd: he enjoys video games, spreadsheets and Star Wars, confessing to attending midnight screenings of the films.

“He’s very much an ‘Ivory Tower’ politician, he doesn’t care much for parliament and the clubbable side of politics,” one Tory MP of his generation remarks. “He certainly doesn’t have a natural support base and has never worked the parliamentary party like some from our intake.” 

His gilded CV offers a clue to his political potential, however. Educated at £40,000-a-year Winchester College, where he was head boy, he went on to Oxford (where he received a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics), Stanford and Goldman Sachs.

It is a classic Conservative path to power, except that in Sunak’s case it has a twist: he did not hail from a moneyed background of land and City interests. His parents were immigrants: his father was a general practitioner in a tough part of Southampton — O’Grady speculates that this may have helped give the chancellor his “compassionate” manner — and his mother ran a local chemist. Later, her son would help to do the accounts.

Sunak, who declined to be interviewed for this article, attributes his Conservative instincts to his parents and their determination to get on and make a better life for their family. “My parents sacrificed a great deal so I could attend good schools,” he says on his website. He took the Winchester scholarship exam but did not win a full scholarship; his parents sent him there anyway.

He was born in 1980. His Indian grandparents emigrated to Britain from east Africa about 60 years ago and the chancellor proudly recalls taking his grandfather around Westminster shortly after he was elected an MP in 2015. “He took his phone out to take a picture,” Sunak told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast last year. “There were tears in his eyes.”

The young Rishi, known as Rish to his friends, spoke English at home and grew up passionate about cricket, Southampton FC and its footballing genius Matt Le Tissier. A practising Hindu, Sunak recalled: “I’d be at the temple at the weekend . . . but I’d also be at the Saints game as well on a Saturday.” He was the target of occasional racism, mentioning to the BBC how “it stung” when he was abused as a “Paki” in a local fast food restaurant.

After graduating from Oxford, Sunak started a job at Goldman Sachs, where he worked as a junior analyst in the merchant banking division for three years. One colleague says he “stood out” early on, recalling an away day at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Sunak was “by far and away the youngest and the most junior guy” present but “took it very seriously in a very pleasant way — he was showing us what to do”. Sunak does not mention his time at Goldman on his “about me” web page.

Starting in 2005, he spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University, studying for an MBA. When he returned to London, he began working in hedge funds. In 2006, he joined the aggressive activist-fund TCI, founded by billionaire Chris Hohn and known for its controversial campaign at ABN Amro that led to the Dutch bank’s sale to Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Fortis. The deal was seen as a critical factor behind RBS’s downfall during the financial crisis.

Hohn has previously told the FT that Sunak had no involvement in the ABN Amro campaign — “He had nothing to do with the bank investment, I led that” — and praised him for his “strong analytical skills, high integrity and low ego”. Sunak’s time at TCI, one of London’s biggest hedge funds, was a successful if demanding one. Hohn is known as a tough boss. “He’s nobody’s fool, he wouldn’t have survived long with Chris Hohn if he were,” says one former colleague.

After leaving TCI in 2009, Sunak joined Theleme Partners with a former TCI colleague, Patrick Degorce. His time there coincided with another controversy: Degorce was ordered to pay back about £8m in tax following a tribunal in 2013 that found he had attempted to shelter millions of pounds in tax. A Treasury official said Sunak had no involvement with this or the TCI campaign at ABN Amro.

Sunak’s time in finance made him rich — he is said to be one of the wealthiest members of parliament. But even without his own resources, money in the Sunak household is not exactly a problem. While at Stanford he met Akshata Murthy, whose father NR Narayana Murthy founded outsourcing company Infosys and is India’s sixth-richest man, with a net worth of more than $2bn, according to Forbes.

Akshata runs fashion label Akshata Designs and is also a director of a venture capital firm founded by her father in 2010. The couple married in 2009 and live with their two young daughters in a Georgian manor house in Sunak’s North Yorkshire constituency of Richmond, and in south-west London.

Sunak’s decision to go into politics was not an obvious one, nor was his choice of the constituency that he hoped to fight at the 2015 election. Richmond, a traditional, well-to-do farming seat of dales and sweeping vistas, had previously been held by the proud Yorkshireman and former Tory leader William Hague.

Hague recalls that constituency activists had already made up their mind to choose another Yorkshireman to fight the seat, possibly a farmer, but Sunak quickly won them over. “Nobody had heard of him but his effect on the association was dramatic,” he says. “They had in their minds the sort of person they wanted and then this totally different person walked in. To their credit, they did a total U-turn. The key thing is he was obviously very intelligent without any trace of arrogance. That’s a very unusual combination in politics. He’s an extreme case of that.”

Sunak, who does not eat beef, threw himself into local life, learning to milk cows and buying a big house in the constituency. Predictably, he won Richmond by a landslide in 2015 when David Cameron secured a majority Conservative government, but it was not yet clear what sort of Conservative he would turn out to be.

At Oxford, Sunak had joined the investment society, learning to trade in markets, rather than pursuing student politics. One fellow minister believes that he eventually entered political life because he wanted to fix things, but that he approaches politics in an unideological way: “He doesn’t have an agenda, he’s a problem solver. He’s more of a businessman than a politician in that respect.” A friend says Sunak “has made the most of all the opportunities given to him and wants to give something back”.

Sajid Javid, who resigned as chancellor in February in a power struggle with Number 10, met Sunak before the 2015 election and says the wannabe politician shared many of his own beliefs: “He’s someone who takes a natural interest in business issues. I felt we were very much on the same page: on business, the economy, free enterprise, lower taxation, less regulation.”

Coronavirus, however, has turned ideology on its head. Sunak has had to renationalise rail franchises, pay part of the country’s wage bill and borrow vast sums of money. Higher taxes may well follow to pay back the debt. Javid says Sunak had “no alternative” and that alongside his tough economic views there is “a lot of compassion” in him. But friends say he is “instinctively against” the statist measures he is being forced to adopt.

Hague says: “There’s nothing wet about him. He would have been a Thatcherite in the days of Thatcher, but he’s not stuck in the 1980s.” He says Sunak also believes in state activism and his perspective as a northern MP informs his desire to get places such as the industrial Tees Valley back on their feet.

“He’s very conscious that Conservatives have to be able to revive an area like that,” Hague continues, noting Sunak’s proposal to create a free port in the area. “You can see the Tees Valley from any hill in the Richmond constituency.”

Sunak’s political pragmatism was evident in his response to the coronavirus crisis. But it is also apparent, according to colleagues, in his approach to the four-nation United Kingdom. An attachment to the Union flag is normally a given for Tory MPs, but colleagues say Sunak typically saw the issue through a financial lens.

One fellow Conservative recalls: “I remember discussing the future of the Union with Rishi and he argued that England should break away. He was advocating the end of the UK because it doesn’t make financial sense to him. He doesn’t have any love for the institution and I suspect he looks at it as he looks at anything: what’s the profit?” Sunak’s allies say the chancellor does not recall the conversation and is a staunch supporter of the Union “and the shared values it represents”.

Sunak’s extraordinary rise from neophyte politician to chancellor in under five years was rooted in two big calls, both of which would ultimately benefit his career. The first, inevitably, was Brexit. When Cameron held his ill-fated EU referendum in 2016, Sunak joined the Leave camp, campaigning alongside Johnson and aligning himself with Tory activists, including many of his Eurosceptic constituents. Richmond would end up voting Leave by 56 per cent.

“He was the new guy up from London, there was no way he could have supported Remain,” says one MP. But Hague and Javid agree that Sunak thought he could see the “economic opportunities” of Brexit, even though many officials at the Treasury he now heads believe it is barmy and have calculated that Johnson’s preferred EU trade deal would cut 5 per cent off British growth over the next 15 years.

Sunak has previously argued that he “went through the numbers” and that his time at Stanford helped to convince him that the world was changing very fast and that the EU was failing to keep up. Britain needed to be more nimble.

“He’s a Brexiter but in my experience that’s not unusual for a second-generation immigrant,” says one minister who knows him well. “This country has changed their life outcomes . . . He went to Winchester and Oxford — these things came as a result of this country. That’s something that has a very strong pull.

“People in international financial services were often strong Brexiters,” he adds. “They had different horizons, they didn’t worry about continental supply chains like people in international business.”

Sunak’s decision to support Leave came as a grave disappointment to Cameron, who had tried personally to win over the newly elected MP. According to one individual with knowledge of the meeting, Cameron sighed as the implacable Sunak left the room: “If we’ve lost Rishi, we’ve lost the future of the party.”

Sunak’s second major call was backing Johnson for the Conservative leadership last summer. He briefly considered supporting Michael Gove, also a fellow Brexiter, telling colleagues: “My heart says Gove, my head says Boris.” Although Sunak presented this as a hard choice about which candidate was most likely to revive Tory fortunes, he also knew that Johnson was likely to win.

In a high-profile intervention, Sunak joined two other rising stars of the party — Robert Jenrick and Oliver Dowden — to back Johnson on the front page of The Times. Sunak’s name appeared first on the article, which was headlined: “The Tories are in deep peril. Only Boris Johnson can save us.”

“Bland, keep-your-head-down people,” was how one minister in a rival camp described the trio. But it also showed them to be supremely ambitious. Sunak had held meetings with Johnson before the endorsement and Tory colleagues say the whole affair was “transactional” and it paid off. Although Johnson insisted he was not handing out jobs during the campaign, all three of the rising MPs now sit at the cabinet table.

To cement his relationship with the soon-to-be prime minister, Sunak quickly followed up by hosting Johnson and his partner Carrie Symonds at his grand Yorkshire home during the leadership campaign, serving burgers from the barbecue in the well-tended grounds. People who have spent time with Sunak and Akshata say the couple are “very hospitable, completely down to earth”.

Although most people say Sunak is unflashy, his wealth can be a subtly deployed political asset: a few months later at the Treasury, he hosted staff at an expensive Mayfair restaurant after completing work on a spending review.

In July 2019, Sunak entered the Treasury as number two to his friend Javid, who became Johnson’s first chancellor. “We had a really good partnership: professional, good-humoured, respectful,” recalls Javid. Mats Persson, a former Treasury adviser, says Sunak made an immediate impression: “He can move between the detail and the big picture in a way which few politicians can. The officials rate him highly. He knows the brief and can lead internal discussions with clarity about what he wants to do.”

Javid quit in February after Johnson — egged on by his combative chief adviser Dominic Cummings — decided to sack all the chancellor’s advisers and merge officials from No 10 and No 11 into a single economic team. By this point it was obvious to everyone — including Javid — that it was only a matter of time until Sunak became chancellor.

As he prepared to walk out of Downing Street, Javid urged Johnson not to choose a soft touch as his replacement: “I told the PM, ‘You need someone who is going to be straight with you and capable,’ and I said that had to be Rishi.” Given that Johnson’s allies already referred to Sunak as “Boris’s favourite minister”, the conversation was probably superfluous.

Sunak’s immediate focus was on preparing a March 11 Budget, which included spending proposals to boost the north of England and a £12bn package to help tackle coronavirus. But within days, as Covid-19 swept the country, ultimately infecting Johnson, Sunak was forced to extend help to furloughed employees, the self-employed and struggling businesses. The bill for the first six months of the outbreak is likely to exceed £60bn; the final reckoning could be much higher.

Coronavirus has been a massive challenge for Sunak. “Rishi is feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders,” says one ally. “He knows there is an enormous responsibility on him and he’s been working 18 hours a day for weeks now. He’s physically and psychologically exhausted. But he’s always the one who says to people: ‘Come on, on to the next job.’”

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It is also a political opportunity. For a decade, Tory chancellors have had to squeeze public spending: Sunak, by contrast, has been praised in recent weeks for behaving like a leftwing Labour chancellor, doling out cash. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s outgoing leader, says his largesse showed the opposition had been “absolutely right” in calling for higher public spending at the 2019 election. 

George Osborne, the chancellor who introduced a period of prolonged austerity in the UK, says Sunak will find it harder when he has to start clawing it back. “I know Rishi and I know he’s more than up to the role,” Osborne previously told the FT. “He’s smart, engaging and unfazed by the big responsibilities he faces. He also knows what all chancellors know: spending the money is the easiest bit of the job; raising it is the hardest.” 

Officials in the Treasury speak reverentially about their new boss, with some saying he is the most capable chancellor since Nigel Lawson more than 30 years ago. But the learning curve has been incredibly steep: Sunak has not even had time to move into No 11 Downing Street from his south-west London base.

Nick Macpherson, permanent secretary at the Treasury for over a decade until 2016, says: “He’s the sort of chancellor the Treasury appreciates: decisive, on top of his brief and prepared to stand up to No 10.”

Macpherson argues that recent policies on banking and liquidity support were plainly drawn up in the Treasury, as was the veiled threat to the self-employed that if they wanted state support they would have to start paying taxes like employees. Frances O’Grady agrees that Sunak already looks like his own man. “It would be hard for anyone to claim right now that he was some kind of malleable person, which was the suggestion when he replaced Sajid Javid,” she says.

Number 10 under Johnson and his consigliere Cummings has, however, never tolerated rival sources of power, hence its decision to bring the Treasury under its wing. Some Tories claim Sunak’s self-assurance and wholesome image is already causing some members of the Johnson camp to look over their shoulder.

His Instagram account, including shots of a focused, whippet-thin Sunak working from home in a grey hoodie, suggests a politician with a keen eye for an arresting image. But Johnson’s allies insist the prime minister and his team have only the highest admiration for Sunak: “He’s a great guy and incredibly talented,” says one aide to the prime minister.

While Sunak’s swift rise means he has had little time to accumulate enemies, he has also not had time to build up a support base. For now, he is dependent on Johnson for his job and is surrounded by advisers screened and appointed by Cummings.

“Who are his friends, his mob?” asks one Tory minister. Other old hands wonder whether he has the political street-fighting skills to cope when the flak is flying, or the ruthless streak to strike when the top job is in sight.

“The question is whether he has the appetite and willingness to take risks,” says one Conservative insider. “It has never been apparent to me that he has a killer instinct. I don’t think he’s a patsy for No 10 but I think this has come a bit early for him.” The chancellor’s allies admit the coronavirus outbreak is a huge personal test for the chancellor: “Rish is keenly aware that this is a major crisis and more experienced blokes than him have been spat out by these kinds of events,” says one.

William Hague isn’t so sure that Sunak is not ready. As the biographer of Pitt the Younger — the Tory statesman who became chancellor in 1782 at the age of 23 and prime minister at the age of 24 — Hague believes the coronavirus crisis could be the furnace in which another great British political career is forged.

“If someone is suddenly given great responsibility and then turns out to be more than equal to the challenge, that immediately overcomes the disadvantages of getting to the top too soon,” he says. “Rishi Sunak’s political potential is huge. He ranks as highly as anyone I’ve seen coming into politics.”

George Parker is the FT’s political editor, Sebastian Payne is the Whitehall correspondent. Additional reporting by Jim Pickard

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