Five things you did not know about Rishi Sunak

1. Prime Minister Sunak is not really ‘Indian’.

Sunak has referred to himself as having “Indian roots” — but remember, that’s pre-Independence, undivided India — not the India of today. He was born in Southampton, England, in 1980, and was educated in Winchester College, a private boarding school, and at the University of Oxford.

However, Sunak will be the first Prime Minister of Britain who is a practising Hindu. (He has been doing gau-puja while on campaign.) He will also be the first person of colour to be PM.

The Prime Minister’s family was Punjabi Khatri, with roots in Gujranwala, north of Lahore, in present-day Pakistan. According to experts who know the history of the family, Sunak’s grandfather, Ramdas Sunak, migrated to Nairobi, Kenya, in 1935, where he took up a job as a clerk. Ramdas’s wife — Sunak’s grandmother — was also from Gujranwala, and she travelled to Kenya in 1937.

Ramdas and Suhag Rani Sunak had six children — and Rishi Sunak’s father, Yashveer, was born in Nairobi in 1949.

Yashveer Sunak moved to Liverpool as a teenager in 1966. He married Usha Berry, the daughter of Raghubir Berry, a Punjabi who had moved to Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania), and Tanganyika-born Sraksha. Rishi Sunak was born to Yashveer and Usha Sunak, both pharmacists, in 1980.

2. He will be Britain’s youngest PM in more than 200 years.

Sunak is only 42. The only man who was younger than him when he became PM was William Pitt the Younger, who became the last Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1783 at age 24 and remained in power until 1801, and then became the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1804.

3. His rise to power has been the fastest in the modern era.

Sunak first became MP (of Richmond, Yorks) in May 2015, and he has become PM in October 2022 — that’s a little more than seven years. Along the way, he has been Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

David Cameron went from MP to PM in nine years — entering Parliament in 2001 and Number 10 in May 2010. Pitt the Younger made the journey in just two years, though.

4. He (along with his wife) is richer than King Charles III (along with the Queen Consort).

The Guardian reported that the combined fortune of Prime Minister Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty is estimated at £730 million, which is double the estimated wealth (£300 million-£350 million) of King Charles III and Camilla, the Queen Consort.

Sunak and Murty own four properties spread across the world and are valued at more than £15 million, The Guardian report said. Murty’s reported 0.91% stake in Infosys (she is the daughter of N R Narayana Murthy) is thought to be worth around £700 million.

5. The Prime Minister is a Coca-Cola addict.

Sunak told two school pupils in March 2021 that he “collects Coca-Cola things”, and that he was “a Coke addict,…a total Coke addict”. As the children sniggered, he rushed to clarify, “Coca-Cola addict, just for the record.” He went on to say his favourite was “Mexican Coke”, and one viewer described it as like a “scene out of The Office”, The Guardian reported.