Rishi Sunak takes office as UK Prime Minister

Just six weeks ago, Rishi Sunak's political career was all but written off. Defeated in the Tory primaries by Liz Truss and repudiated by his party colleagues for having "betrayed" Boris Johnson with his early exit from the Executive - which ultimately hastened the resignation of the former prime minister -, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer was forced to wait for a new opportunity from a discreet second row. But another dramatic twist in the script has placed the Indian-born politician at 10 Downing Street. 

After being asked by King Charles III at Buckingham Palace to form a government, Sunak arrived at the Prime Minister's residence on Tuesday morning to address the nation for the first time as head of government. He did so on Monday minutes after being elected leader of the Conservative Party in a brief, aseptic speech. Today, Sunak has been given licence for solemnity following the final retirement of Liz Truss, who announced her resignation just 45 days after taking office. 

"I will put economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government's agenda," she declared outside 10 Downing Street. "The government I lead will not leave the next generation, your children and grandchildren, with a debt to pay off that we were too weak to pay off ourselves." Sunak appeared without supporters and alone, unaccompanied by his wife, billionaire Akshata Murty, who was found to be taxed in the US to pay less tax.

"Trust is earned. And I will earn yours," said the new Tory leader, who had words for the hapless former prime minister: "I want to pay tribute to my predecessor Liz Truss, she was not wrong to want to improve the growth of this country, it is a noble goal. And I admire her drive to create change. But some mistakes were made. Not born of ill will or bad intentions. In fact, quite the opposite. But mistakes nonetheless. 

A follower of fiscal orthodoxy, Sunak pledges to continue on the neo-liberal path when the stage is right. In the primaries he defended, in opposition to Truss, maintaining taxation and not drastically reducing public spending, which caused him to lose ground against the conservatives' top brass and ultimately led to the fall of the former prime minister and, days earlier, of her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng. The worst hit was the pound. 

"This will mean difficult decisions in the future. But you saw me during COVID-19, doing everything I could to protect people and businesses," Sunak said in his maiden speech. During the pandemic, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he promoted a job retention scheme similar to that adopted by other European governments, with incentives and subsidies. 

"The markets have calmed down and the pound has risen," analyst Inés Gómez Durán told Atalayar. "The Tories believe that a more moderate stance can restore the Conservatives' credibility, but everything will depend on the coming months. With winter just around the corner, it remains to be seen how he will weather the crises. 

Sunak has thus become the UK's 57th prime minister, the fifth Conservative in a row and the third in just six weeks. But, like Truss, he has been elected to the premiership by 200 Tory MPs, which has raised doubts about his democratic legitimacy. "The mandate that my party won in 2019 is not the exclusive property of any individual, it is a mandate that belongs to us and unites us all," he responded from the lectern.

"I don't see elections in the short term because the Conservative Party has chosen Sunak precisely to avoid such elections. At present, they would result in a victory for Labour, although it seems that the new prime minister could reverse the situation", says Gómez Durán. "It is difficult to predict that he will finish his term in such a volatile scenario as the British one", he admits. 

Gómez Durán acknowledges that Sunak's leadership "can help improve the party's image. He is the youngest prime minister in 200 years, of Indian origin and a practising Hindu. Eurosceptic, but outside the hard wing". "All in all, it's a bit of a facelift for the image of the Conservative Party," he admits to Atalayar. 

In a matter of hours, the new prime minister has appointed the most important members of his new cabinet. He promised to unite the nation and, above all, to rebuild a divided Conservative Party after two intense primaries. And so he has. Sunak has tried to reconcile the different Tory factions by keeping James Cleverley in the Foreign Office, despite having backed Johnson in his bid to regain office, Ben Wallace in Defence and Jeremy Hunt in Finance.