Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is all set to become the next Prime Minister of the U.K. after comfortably seeing off leadership challenges from former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt.
By 2pm U.K. time on Monday, Oct. 24, the cut off time for the leadership race for the ruling Conservative Party, Sunak had secured the backing of 193 members of parliament, much more than the 100 required to stay in the reckoning. Mordaunt withdrew from the race seconds before the deadline.
“Our Party is our membership. Whether we are elected representatives, activists, fundraisers or supporters. We all have a stake in who our leader is,” Mordaunt said in a tweeted statement. “These are unprecedented times. Despite the compressed timetable for the leadership contest it is clear that colleagues feel we need certainty today. They have taken this decision in good faith for the good of the country. Members should know that this proposition has been fairly and thoroughly tested by the agreed 1922 process.”
“As a result, we have now chosen our next Prime Minister. This decision is an historic one and shows, once again, the diversity and talent of our party. Rishi has my full support, I am proud of the campaign we ran and grateful to all those, across all sides of our party, who gave me their backing. We all owe it to the country, to each other and to Rishi to unite and work together for the good of the nation. There is much work to be done,” Mordaunt added.
When he is sworn in, Sunak will become the first person of color and first Indian-origin Prime Minister of the U.K. He will be the third U.K. Prime Minister to serve this year.
Sunak’s accession to power comes after months of political turmoil in the country and he will have to deal with the ongoing cost of living crisis, double digit inflation, a cratered economy thanks to his immediate predecessor Liz Truss’ ill-received fiscal policies and the overall impact of Brexit.
Truss, whose leadership got off to a disastrous start after her emergency budget, announced by her closest ally, then Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, was met with almost universal horror, and saw interest rates rise while the value of the British pound plummeted against the U.S. dollar, was forced to resign in ignominy last week.
Truss reigned for just 44 days, the shortest tenure for a Prime Minister in the history of the country. She became Prime Minister, beating Sunak in a leadership contest, because Boris Johnson was forced to quit amid mounting scandals and the resignations of his top ministers, including Sunak.
After Truss’ resignation last week, Johnson cut short his Caribbean holiday and rushed back to the U.K. to mount a challenge for the position he had relinquished just six weeks previously. However, he opted out of the race on Sunday, despite saying that he believed he would win the contest.
“You can’t govern effectively unless you have a united party in parliament. And though I have reached out to both Rishi and Penny – because I hoped that we could come together in the national interest – we have sadly not been able to work out a way of doing this,” Johnson said in a statement on Sunday. “Therefore I am afraid the best thing is that I do not allow my nomination to go forward and commit my support to whoever succeeds. I believe I have much to offer but I am afraid that this is simply not the right time.”
Sunak, who attended the world premiere of “Matilda” during the recent BFI London Film Festival, is very clear on a pressing issue in the U.K. media landscape – the privatization of public service broadcaster Channel 4. During the previous leadership race, Sunak had indicated that he would go ahead with the process if he became Prime Minister.
“Privatization will help Channel 4 to thrive in an age where they are also competing with Netflix, Amazon, Apple and many more — standing still is not an option,” a spokesperson for Sunak had said at the time.