Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak has become the first person of colour to serve as prime minister of Great Britain, fending off challenges for leadership of the Conservative party from disgraced former PM Boris Johnson and former cabinet minister and leader of the house Penny Mordaunt, among others. Sunak got to make an unexpected second run at the premiership in less than two months after the disastrous six-week term of Liz Truss, who comfortably beat him for the job in September.

For the Conservative Party, appointing Sunak is also a reflection of how wrong and out of touch their leadership voters were the last time around. Every reputable political analyst saw the centrist Sunak as a competent choice for the role, but something about his appearance that differed from his predecessors over the past few centuries seemed to have factored into the choice of Truss, whose positions and support lie at the far right of the party, which most analysts correctly predicted were doomed to fail if ever implemented.

Unfortunately, the disastrous Truss experiment has left Prime Minister Sunak with the uphill task of quickly righting the economy as winter and increasing energy bills set in. Sunak, whose parents and grandparents were Indian-origin immigrants from East Africa, also has a vague Pakistan connection — his paternal grandfather was born in Gujranwala. Although the former banker is also independently wealthy, his marriage to Akshata Murthy, the daughter of Indian tech billionaire and Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, places the couple among the 250 richest people in Britain and makes Sunak the richest prime minister ever.

However, with all that money come a few problems as well. Sunak’s wife had been using her Indian citizenship to exploit a residency rule for overseas earners to avoid paying millions of pounds in taxes, even when her husband, as chancellor of the exchequer, was setting British economic policies. Sunak has also been accused of using legal, but frowned-upon methods to lower his tax burden. But the fact that he remains by far the best choice for Conservative Party leader is a reflection of the other options.