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Rishi Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fund head who stepped down last summer from his post as Chancellor of the Exchequer to protest ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, will be the next leader of the United Kingdom after a brief, yet disastrous tenure by Liz Truss.
Nadine Dorries, a loyalist to Johnson, told The BBC that Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants who studied at Oxford, was fined over the same “Partygate” lockdown offenses that contributed to Johnson’s undoing. Sunak, who is 42, is the youngest prime minister in 200 years.
The report noted that William Pitt, who was 24 at the time he was elected in 1783, is the youngest ever.
Sunak’s victory was sealed after Johnson pulled out of the race to replace Truss.
She announced her resignation last week—on her 45th day of service—easily setting the record for the shortest tenure of any British prime minister in history.
Her tenure was tenuous and started with the death of Queen Elizabeth. She could not even escape the queen’s funeral without taking political fire after it was revealed that she once called for the end of the monarchy.
But the queen’s death proved to be her high point at 10 Downing. Just over a week later, Kwasi Kwarteng, her former chancellor, announced new plans for tax cuts that were not funded, which sent the British pound into a freefall.
The New York Times reported that the tax-cut announcement shattered Truss’s credibility, “degraded Britain’s reputation with investors, drove up home mortgage rates, pushed the pound down to near parity with the American dollar, and forced the Bank of England to intervene to prop up British bonds.”
The Financial Times said Truss, 47, watched her “authority shredded within two weeks of taking office.” (See “TRUSS SACKS FINANCE CHIEF, BACKTRACKS ON MASSIVE TAX CUTS” and “TRUSS COMES OUT OF ‘HIDING,’ SAYS, ‘PUTIN MUST FAIL’ IN UKRAINE.”)
Nobody questioned the challenges that Truss faced as prime minister. Like most European countries, she faces soaring energy prices and inflation and the U.K.’s commitment to Ukraine.
Besides the criticism over the tax-cut plan, which was even questioned by the International Monetary Fund, she was also roundly criticized for not commenting quickly enough about the financial turmoil in her country.
The political obituary writers have described her as a survivor who was obsessed with career advancement no matter the cost. Before serving as prime minister, she was the country’s foreign minister under Boris Johnson.
Johnson resigned in July after being ensnared by ethics scandals and began to see members of his Cabinet resign after three years.
Besides locking down the U.K. while he and his team partied, Johnson’s latest and last of his scandals was his inability to survive disclosures that he knew about sexual misconduct allegations against Chris Pincher, his former deputy whip.
Sunak tweeted on Sunday that the country faces a “profound economic crisis.”
“That’s why I am standing to be Leader of the Conservative Party and your next Prime Minister. I want to fix our economy, unite our Party and deliver for our country,” the former chancellor of the exchequer tweeted.
TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has long noted that the global economic crisis will continue to unseat politicians and the situation is only going to get worse.
Moody’s announced last week that the U.K.’s economic outlook has been lowered to “negative” due to two main reasons: its volatile domestic political landscape and worries that it will not be able to manage the “shock arising from weaker growth prospects and high inflation.”
The U.K.’s CPI rose 8.8 percent in the 12 months leading to September 2022, which is a 40-year high. That is a painful combination when government debt is also at its highest level in almost 60 years, with public borrowing rising to 98 percent of economic output.