The kitchen at Kuti’s Brasserie, not far from Southampton docks, was not the sort of place, in August 1998, you would have gone looking for a future hedge funder, son-in-law of a billionaire and Conservative chancellor.
That summer – the summer of the France 98 World Cup and the Omagh bombing – Kuti Miah, the eponymous restaurateur behind the curry house, went to have a word with one of his waiters. ‘You’re going to be someone, Rishi,’ he said. The future UK chancellor flashed his famous smile. He was, adds Miah, ‘a brilliant talker’. Rishi Sunak, then 18, was about to go to Oxford, but that holiday he waited tables for Miah, a close family friend, to earn some pocket money. ‘I saw him grow up,’ says Miah. ‘His father used to bring him in his carry cot.’
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Miah was fast friends with Yashvir and Usha Sunak, both Hindu Punjabis born in colonial Kenya and Tanzania respectively, whose parents had migrated from India. After India’s independence, both families left East Africa for Southampton in the mid-to-late 1960s. Yashvir and Usha met in Britain and married. He became a local GP and she ran a pharmacy. They were ‘brilliant conversationalists’ and ‘very strong believers’ who ‘worked very, very hard’, according to Miah, who also recalls that they were ‘passionately British’.
Rishi, the eldest of their three children, was cut from the same patriotic cloth. Not only did the young Sunak fall in love with the game of cricket, he fervently supported England over India at any opportunity. His career, too, has followed one of the most traditional and storied of England’s paths to power. Like five chancellors of the exchequer before him, Sunak was schooled at the ancient and distinguished Winchester College; and like three of those same Wykehamist chancellors, he went on, as was expected, to study at Oxford.
And you couldn’t get more British than my first encounter with the 40-year-old now Prime Minister. Back then, when we met, he was standing outside a Costa Coffee in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, on a drizzly afternoon in April 2015. It was the lead-up to the last general election before Brexit, and Sunak was a first-timer campaigning for the safe Tory seat of Richmond, in the Yorkshire Dales. Easy with the smile, sharp with the mind, he had a breezy, west London manner about him, cracking a very Kensington-dwelling joke that his neighbouring (and long grotty) Shepherd’s Bush was now better called the bougie ‘Shey-Boo’.
We were a long way from London – from where Sunak had been ‘parachuted in’ for the seat. During the interview, I had a distinct sense of being the only person in the cafe who knew that this slight man in a Barbour jacket was running for parliament. ‘I tell this story when I’m out and about,’ he said, coffee in hand, ‘that you can come to this country with very little... My grandparents came with very little from a village in northern India, and two generations on, their grandson has this enormous privilege of running as a candidate for parliament. For my family, the route was education.’
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He was vying for a seat once presided over by Tory grandees William Hague and Leon Brittan. But I had spent days in Richmond and the surrounding area, reporting on the resentment his sudden arrival had stirred up among certain local Tory notables, who felt the seat in the Dales was rightfully theirs. ‘There was a very acrimonious constituency battle,’ claimed one source, with a lot of hostility to an outsider coming in. (Sunak once joked that he and his wife made up the entire immigrant population of the constituency.)
Later that afternoon, I bumped into Akshata, Sunak’s glamorous wife, sheltering from the rain in a more upscale cafe. She smiled and waved, but seemed downcast, perhaps not exactly enamoured with a wet afternoon on Northallerton High Street. Akshata, the daughter of one of the richest men in India and with a personal fortune that has since been estimated to be as high as £300 million, had for the past few weeks found herself visiting muddy cow markets and village fêtes – places where local farmers had aired their thoughts on their new Conservative candidate to me with that infamous turn of phrase, ‘I’m not racist, but...’
Sunak’s billionaire father-in-law, NR Narayana Murthy, however, has been so enthusiastic about Sunak’s parliamentary career that he’d flown in, and had even been leafleting on his behalf, wearing a Rishi sweatshirt. ‘To be honest,’ said Sunak in Costa Coffee that day, ‘I think it’s patronising to assume minorities should only run in minority seats.’
He duly followed in Hague’s footsteps. On 7 May 2015, Sunak won, with more than 50 per cent of the vote (a Ukip vote of 15 per cent had appeared from nowhere). He put down roots in his new constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire, augmenting a £10 million property portfolio (metropolitan digs in London – a Kensington mews house, a flat on Old Brompton Road – and a place in California) with a £1.5 million Georgian manor in Yorkshire set across 12 acres, including an ornamental lake. Here, he now entertains the constituency membership with lavish summer parties at which uniformed staff serve champagne and canapés. He has been repeatedly dubbed by newspapers the ‘Maharajah of the Yorkshire Dales’.
In a swift few years, Sunak has become known as many things: Dishy Rishi to the tabloids; one of the richest MPs in Westminster; the second-youngest-ever chancellor of the exchequer, presiding over a £350 billion package to boost the economy (the largest ever recorded in peacetime); and a former hedge funder whose profile has risen faster than stocks in a vaccine manufacturer.
Amid the chaos of British politics, it’s easy to forget just how extraordinary the rise of Rishi Sunak has been. Sunak became an MP only five years back. Less than a year ago, he was the most junior minister in the department for local government. Today, the chancellor battling the coronavirus fallout is tipped not only as a future prime minister, but Britain’s first non-white leader.
What’s less clear is where he stands politically. ‘He’s a modern non-ideological conservative,’ his predecessor William Hague told Tatler – the two are regularly in touch about the matters of the day. Others in his old Tory City set are less charitable: ‘His luck has given him the politics of the head boy,’ said one contemporary in finance, referring to Sunak’s zeal in upholding institutions. ‘He doesn’t understand how much needs to change.’
How best to grasp this dazzling success story? The turning point in Sunak’s life came at the end of primary school, when a hard-working boy from a striving middle-class immigrant family got a place to study at Winchester College. It would be a world away from the kitchen at Kuti’s Brasserie; Winchester boys even had a Victorian public-school language of their own, in which bicycles were ‘bogles’ and cigarettes were ‘trusts’. Very few, if any of them, had to earn money waiting tables during the summer months.
But Winchester would come at a price for the Sunaks. No sooner was he accepted than Rishi’s good fortune immediately foundered: he missed out on the expected scholarship. Desperate not to let the opportunity go to waste, his parents decided to take on the high fees themselves, picking up extra work and making what the chancellor has called considerable ‘sacrifices’. His brother would later follow.
Tim Johnson, now a lawyer, was in the boarding house next door. ‘Rishi was a good chap, in boarding-school idiom,’ he recalled. Sunak, he said, was a ‘reasonable cricketer’, who stood out in friendliness; and he was a solid, but never number one, student. ‘Rishi was always expected to do something,’ Johnson remembered. But exactly what, beyond Winchester, was vague. ‘He was always expected to be head boy as he was clever enough, reasonable enough and well behaved enough.’ This became Sunak’s thing – hard work and attainment, becoming the first Winchester head of school from an Indian background.
Sunak was different to other sixth formers in Winchester: a lifelong nondrinker, he wasn’t distracted by the allure of the pub. But there was something else that marked him out from the herd. He was a conservative in every sense: not only in his outlook and demeanour but in his religious attitudes, too – a practising Hindu who avoided beef. At school, where few boys were political, Sunak was clearly ‘associated with the Tories’, said Johnson. It was 1997, The Chemical Brothers were topping the charts and the mood was rebellious. Counterculture, New Labour and ripped jeans were in; the Conservatives were out. ‘That wasn’t his intellectual jam. Rishi didn’t play that game,’ Johnson explained.
‘Everyone was chipper about it when Blair won,’ Johnson said. But not Rishi. His family’s story was closer to Margaret Thatcher’s than that of his bourgeois Labourite classmates. Watching the early results of the landslide on election night 1997, Sunak sat down to write a gloomy article for the school magazine, The Wykehamist, lamenting the news. His main complaint: Europe. ‘He revels in the label of a patriot,’ he complained of Tony Blair, ‘but has plans for the possible break-up of the United Kingdom and membership of an eventual European Superstate.’ The seeds of Brexit were already in his mind.
‘Already,’ fretted Sunak, ‘the New Labour rhetoric sounds worryingly pro-European and avid pro-Europeans are being sent to Brussels.’ Sunak was not, as some have speculated, a johnny-come-lately to Euroscepticism. His suspicion of the European Union was there from the start. Yet Sunak’s political ambition was not yet fully apparent. Like so many Wykehamists, for university, Rishi picked Oxford. And like so many ambitious young men before him, he chose politics, philosophy and economics. But outside of Lincoln College, where he studied, Sunak had no reputation. He was nothing like the young William Hague, who arrived at Oxford fêted and almost a Tory celebrity, or the young Boris Johnson, the blond beast who tore apart the Oxford Union. At Oxford, Sunak was a nobody, much like Tony Blair. ‘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,’ Sunak’s senior PPE tutor, Michael Rosen, recalled.
Oxford acquaintances remember him as a nerdy teetotaller who was ‘just very clearly going into business’. He would ‘make this big thing’ out of drinking Coke in the pub. ‘Rishi was unknown to the student politicians, that gossipy overlapping world, who all knew each other,’ said Marcus Walker, then-president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, now a clergyman. Sunak was never a member.
It is hard to remember how irrelevant and demoralised Tory circles felt after 1997, but some do recall Sunak as a ‘Thatcherite’ and ‘Eurosceptic’. ‘That was absolutely par for the course,’ said Walker. ‘If you were still a Tory after 1997, you were a Eurosceptic. That was all you had left.’ These days, socially, Sunak has been placed by some in Westminster’s Spectator set. He was best man to his lifelong friend and fellow Old Wykehamist James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator, at Forsyth’s politician-studded wedding in 2011, to Allegra Stratton, the national editor at ITV News – and gave what one guest recalled was ‘one of the most touching best man’s speeches I’ve ever heard’. (In fact, Stratton has recently announced she’s leaving ITV News for a job with Sunak at the Treasury. Some have seen this as very Cameron-esque in its ‘chumocracy’.)
But while at Oxford, Sunak’s ambition found other outlets besides running with a political crowd: he became president of the Oxford University Investment Society, where keen young students invited bankers to lecture them on how to make it in the City. When Sunak graduated in 2001, he went straight to Goldman Sachs, as the hyper-ambitious did in those days. Today, it is amazing how distant that world now seems – the apex of Blairism, the financial arrogance, American imperialism and the Davos consensus. Yet Sunak trod lightly at Goldman, leaving in 2004. After two years in California completing a CV-topping MBA, he returned to London and Mayfair in 2006, where a new type of boutique finance was booming: hedge funds. He was hired by Sir Chris Hohn at The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI). It was a dream job: a big role at an activist firm off Berkeley Square at the peak of their fame. ‘He appears to have been trusted,’ said a source. Indeed, Sunak was made a partner two years later. Contemporaries remember him ever-ready to meet and greet; a mixture of a junior, deputy and a bag carrier; the perfect foil to Hohn’s bolshy swagger. ‘Ridiculously nice.’ ‘Affable.’ ‘Approachable.’ ‘Charming.’ These are the words that come up again and again among Mayfair types who knew Sunak. The charm was of a particular kind: ‘There are two kinds of people at hedge funds,’ said one source. ‘Handsome and thin smooth-talkers who are always on the phone or going out to lunch with clients, getting them to part with their money. And then quants in the back room with their shirts buttoned up badly.’
Sunak was one of the smooth-talkers, his charm honed on calls to investors, getting them on board with whatever drastic moves the fund wanted to make. The kind of charm that prizes clarity and persuades people to part with their money. It worked: but hedge-fund charm is designed to hide as much as it reveals. The atmosphere at TCI was buccaneering and bold; it both led and profited from a controversial banking raid that eventually meant a £45.5 billion public bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland. (The Treasury and TCI say Sunak was not involved in the deal.) He left when TCI split in 2009, and joined the breakaway hedge fund Theleme Partners. His new firm’s reputation took a knock when its founder was revealed to have used a notorious tax avoidance scheme. The Labour Party researched Sunak’s past during the 2019 election. ‘But he was too little known for us to use it,’ said one source. That profile was to change.
Post-Goldman, after nearly three years in finance and aged 24, Sunak took time out to do an MBA at Stanford, winning a prestigious Fulbright scholarship. It was here that he met Akshata Murthy, an artistic and fashion-loving fellow student with a deep passion for India’s traditional craftsmanship. Within four years, they were married. Sunak had leap-frogged out of a successful – if not altogether dazzling – hedge-fund career into another league altogether. Murthy’s father was one of India’s legendary billionaires. ‘He’s a very intransigent man,’ said one Indian associate of Murthy’s. ‘Extremely uncompromising.’ NR Narayana Murthy’s rise is, in many ways, the opposite of Sunak’s; where Rishi has always been the golden loyalist, the good soldier smoothly ascending through the ranks of British life, the path of his father-in-law has been defined by a sudden sharp turn.
As a youthful Marxist, a humble son of an ‘anti-US and pro-USSR’ teacher in Mysore, Murthy was arrested in 1974 by Bulgarian guards on the border of Yugoslavia, on a visit to see actual existing socialism. He was held for five days without food or water and ordered to leave the country via Istanbul, for the crime of asking questions about life in Bulgaria. ‘I lost faith in communism,’ he reminisced. Murthy returned to India ‘cured’, in his own words, of his illusions, with dreams of putting his engineering skills to the task of starting a company.
In 1981, he founded Infosys with six colleagues. The company was so bare bones they did not have a computer until two years later and the firm’s office was Murthy’s front room. Almost 40 years on, it has grown into one of the companies synonymous with India’s transformation to an IT powerhouse. Mr and Mrs Murthy are now middle-class heroes in India, with both seen as projecting a soft nationalist, religious aura. So ostentatiously humble is Sudha Murthy’s style of dress that her treatment caused an uproar in India when she was told by a fellow passenger to leave a business-class queue at Heathrow Airport. Her daughter, a source confirmed, was not amused.
In 2009, Akshata and Sunak were married in a two-day ceremony in Bangalore, attended by Indian politicians and celebrities. Yet for all the Murthys’ immense wealth, Sunak was not afraid to bring them to Southampton, to the family temple he attended growing up and to Kuti’s Brasserie, where he’d once laid tables. ‘The Murthys were just the most humble, lovely people,’ recalled Kuti Miah, who catered a 200-strong reception for Sunak at his new Thai restaurant by the port car terminal.
For Murthy, Sunak was the perfect son-in-law – a man he saw as defined by his ‘honesty’. He not only trusted, but rated, him enough to make him a director at Catamaran Investment, his private family investment vehicle. Having joined the world of the plutocrats, Sunak decided to enter politics. Quite why is a matter of debate.
Many in Westminster see his motivation as status. ‘He’s not an ideologue,’ said one Tory source. ‘He wanted to enter politics in that old-fashioned way, because it was seen as the good thing to do.’ Good, as in socially ambitious. Whether that’s true is another matter, because first came a stint at Policy Exchange, leading a unit researching black and minority ethnic attitudes. The scruffy but influential Conservative think tank world is seen as a de facto holding pen for future special advisers, but it was nonetheless an unexpectedly technical way into Westminster for someone with means.
Sunak quickly made an impression. ‘He’s got that Blair-like ability to hold your eye,’ says Nick Faith, who worked with him there. Sunak cut a snappy figure amid slovenly suits. ‘He’s into his clothing.’ His is not the fusty establishment Rees-Mogg or Nicholas Soames style, but more the wiry Emmanuel Macron look. Everything Sunak wears, many remarked, is immaculate, even at the end of a Treasury work day, and fits perfectly. Faith says that ‘everything, from how Rishi dresses to how he structures his life, is very well organised’. Sunak’s elegant house in London, with a touch of Indian decor, reflects that. ‘Nothing is out of place. For someone with two small kids, that’s quite an achievement.’
Sunak takes his parliamentary oath to the Queen on the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. But his political style is more materialist. ‘His mind works in Excel,’ said one City contemporary. But like all hedge funders, it also works in bets: and the two biggest bets that Sunak has made in his career have paid off spectacularly – Brexit and Boris. David Cameron knew the gravity of his predicament when Sunak came out for Leave. ‘If we’ve lost Rishi, we’ve lost the future of the party,’ he reportedly said. The same thing played out in reverse in June 2019 when Sunak came out for Boris in The Times with two other MPs during the party leadership elections. This was widely seen in Westminster as a decisive turning point: the one where Johnson won over ‘the sensibles’ and pivoted the backbenchers. The PM seems to agree: all three have been handsomely rewarded.
In Westminster, as in Mayfair, as at Oxford, Sunak made a name for himself as hard-working, detail-oriented and affable. ‘He’s got an extremely devoted wife,’ said one MP. ‘She’s got no problem with him staying out until midnight doing what has to be done. If I did that my wife would have my head for dinner.’ Yet Sunak has remained something of an enigma, coming across as guarded, stiff and quiet for a politician. ‘He’s unknown in parliament,’ said one MP. ‘He doesn’t play the parliamentary game at all.’ Tory Remainers are sceptical of him. ‘It’s Star Wars,’ said one MP, referring to the chancellor’s strange and classically ‘geek-chic’ hobby for minutely detailed models of spaceships and video games. ‘Most of his political philosophy comes out of the Star Wars trade wars that are about the independence of various king- doms from the Empire. He’s not someone intellectual.’ Loyalty has been his strongest suit. Sunak is a No 10 man. ‘He’s a grown-up,’ said one MP. ‘The only grown-up in Downing Street, despite him being 20 years younger than them.’
Boris Johnson, Carrie Symonds and Michael Gove are all fans, Sunak impressing them with his smooth performance in the election. But also with his attitude. At the height of tensions over Brexit last year, he was cheerfully going around Westminster saying he would back ‘no deal’ if push came to shove. He struck the right note, in the right place, at the right time. Tensions between Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid’s teams exploded in February, when the then-chancellor resigned after refusing to fire his own special advisers and submit to an unprecedented joint team with Downing Street, effectively under the stewardship of Dominic Cummings. It was Sunak, with high skills and no clear agenda or faction behind him in parliament, whom Downing Street turned to. He quickly agreed to the joint team, once again becoming the perfect foil for an outsized boss. And at first, Sunak was mocked as a puppet chancellor. But Treasury officials are impressed: this is a minister who can absorb the data. And the crisis has pushed away talk that Sunak is a ‘chino’: chancellor in name only.
Still, political jealousy in parliament is not hard to detect. Nor burgeoning tensions with Matt Hancock, in charge of the NHS, over when to end the lockdown. Concern can be felt by some in Downing Street that he may have grown too popular and too important. ‘There are those who hate him, as he’s now unfireable,’ said one MP. ‘There are many who don’t like the fact another power base is emerging.’
But can the ‘brilliant talker’ from Kuti’s Brasserie prove himself as the new Prime Minister? British politics has recently been littered with those whose tenure was short in Downing Street. But not many of them had a story they could tell Britain. ‘He reminds me of the fresh-faced Blair I met in the 1980s,’ said one political old-timer. ‘You know when you are around someone who sees the main chance very quickly while others stumble around. I saw it in Blair and I can see it in him.’ Maybe. But is the golden boy of British politics due a Shakespearean fall?
‘We are very early in his political education,’ said one Tory source. ‘There are quite a few harsh lessons about politics that Rishi has yet to encounter.’
This article first appeared in the July/August 2020 issue of Tatler
