Neighbours knew GP’s son Rishi Sunak had a bright future

Although he became wealthy, first through setting up a hedge fund and later marrying the daughter of an Indian billionaire, Rishi Sunak came from humble beginnings.

Rishi Sunak is the eldest son of a GP and a pharmacist, and would deliver medicine on his bike as a kid, and also help file the family accounts.

He once criticised Liz Truss for “fairytale economics” but now Rishi Sunak, whose parents migrated from East Africa to England in the 1960s, has completed his own fairytale.

As he prepares to move into No 10, he can look back on a rise from the small house where he grew up in Portswood, a suburb of Southampton, the eldest of three children. Although Sunak became rich, first through setting up a hedge fund and later marrying the daughter of an Indian billionaire, he came from humble beginnings.

He was born in May 1980 at Southampton General Hospital to Yashvir and Usha Sunak, Hindu Punjabis from colonial Kenya and Tanzania.

Sunak’s parents met and married after migrating to the UK. Yashvir studied medicine at the University of Liverpool and became a GP while Usha was a pharmacist, running chemists in Hampshire before setting up Sunak Pharmacy.

The shop was a central part of family life and Sunak would deliver medicine on his bike as well as file the accounts while studying for his A-levels.

His family never missed a Christmas Eve at Kuti’s Brasserie in Southampton and Kuti Miah, the Indian restaurant’s owner, said Sunak worked shifts “for fun” because he liked meeting people.

Miah, 62, said: “I want to wish him all the best. He will do the job passionately. Knowing him, I know he will do his best, he will be honest with people. He’s a human lover, he’s not doing the job for money, he’s got enough money.”

Sunak in Parliament.

The pharmacy helped to finance sending Sunak to Oakmount, a prep school close to the family home. He then attended Stroud School, another private school, in rural Hampshire.

The family moved to a six-bedroom home and yesterday a neighbour, Janet Parnell, 69, said: “I placed a bet after my brother-in-law told me Rishi had become an MP and there was a newspaper article speaking of him as possible prime minister material,” she said. “The odds were quite good at the time and I did place a bet online but I can’t find it now!”

Parnell said Sunak would play cricket with his siblings and other children on the street, which is lined on one side by 1980s-built detached houses and on the other by woodland.

“Rishi was very personable and he and his siblings were very confident speaking to us, as children speaking to adults. They were always very friendly,” she said. “Their parents encouraged the children to do well and gave them whatever opportunities they could. They were lovely neighbours.”

Parnell said she saw Sunak’s father helping as a volunteer at a coronavirus vaccination centre on Sunday.

Sunak was granted a place at Winchester College, one of Britain’s most expensive private schools, and defied convention by being made head boy despite not being a boarder. It was not a scholarship and his father once remarked the fees were “quite a large financial commitment”. Sunak once wrote that “my parents sacrificed a great deal so I could attend good schools”.

He played cricket, hockey, athletics and football and is a fan of Southampton FC.

The family appeared in a BBC documentary in 2001 entitled Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, a clip of which recently resurfaced online and went viral. The future prime minister can be seen declaring that he has working-class friends, before retracting the statement as if it were absurd.

Sunak and his wife have donated more than £100,000 to Winchester College as benefactors. From there, he studied philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, and graduated with a first-class degree in 2001 after studying under Professor Michael Rosen.

The lecturer, who moved on to Harvard, has said of Sunak: “His fellow students certainly said, slightly lightheartedly, that he wanted to become Conservative prime minister. But I don’t think anyone took that too seriously — it was more of a joke. Perhaps I’m surprised that he’s got as far as he’s gone, as fast as he’s gone — but I’m not surprised that he found himself in parliament.”

He joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst and after nearly three years in finance he won a Fulbright scholarship and took time out to do a masters in business administration at Stanford. It was there that he met Akshata Murty, a student and daughter of the Indian billionaire NR Narayana Murthy, India’s sixth-richest man. She has a £715 million shareholding in Infosys, her father’s multinational IT company.

Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murthy, centre, with King Charles and his wife Camilla and former Home Secretary Priti Patel, far left.

Sunak and daughter Anoushka.

They wed in 2009 in her home city of Bangalore in a two-day ceremony attended by 1,000 guests, and went on to have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka.

Sunak later worked for a London hedge fund before setting up Theleme Partners, his own business, in 2010. He became MP for Richmond in the Yorkshire Dales in 2015, succeeding William Hague. He has had a rapid rise in the party, serving as parliamentary undersecretary for local government and then chief secretary to the Treasury, before being appointed chancellor by Boris Johnson in February 2020, weeks before the pandemic.

His popularity soared with the launch of the £69 billion furlough scheme and he gained further support with the public after introducing “Eat Out to Help Out”, a discount scheme for dining out during the first summer after the national lockdown.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak use hand sanitiser during a visit to Pizza Pilgrims in West India Quay, London Docklands in 2020.

However, his reputation suffered when it emerged he had attended a No 10 party in breach of Covid rules.

He also came under pressure to resign after it was revealed that his wife was a non-dom, a status that meant she did not have to pay British tax on her foreign income.

Within days she agreed to start paying British taxes on her worldwide earnings in what was seen as a move to save her husband’s career. He was also damaged by the revelation that he kept his green card, which gives the right to live and work in the US, until last year.

The couple have a £7 million mews house in west London and a £1.5 million manor house in his Yorkshire constituency, where he is known as “the Maharajah of the Dales”.

The constituency home of Rishi Sunak in Northallerton, England.

Sunak has long pledged to play for the Kirby Sigston first XI cricket team, but since moving to the North Yorkshire hamlet more than seven years ago, political commitments have always got in the way.

When last month he lost the leadership race to Liz Truss and found himself on the back benches for the first time since 2018, Sunak told the team that next summer would be the year he finally stepped out into the middle.

“Well, I somehow don’t think that will be happening now,” said John Winspear, 82, a dairy farmer and stalwart of the side. “I’m very pleased for him. He’s the right man for the job. But I would have dearly liked to see him playing a game for us.”

The Times