Boris Johnson withdrew from the Tory leadership race yesterday, and then today, Penny Mordaunt withdrew. Their withdrawals meant that Rishi Sunak is the new British prime minister. The third prime minister in seven weeks, the third prime minister is less than two full menstrual cycles. Sunak is also the first person of color to ever serve as prime minister – he’s the son of Indian immigrants, so he’s the first British Asian person to run the government and the first Hindu! Happy Diwali, Mr. Prime Minister.
Rishi Sunak will become Britain’s next prime minister, prevailing in a chaotic Conservative Party leadership race on Monday after his remaining rival for the position, Penny Mordaunt, withdrew. He will be Britain’s third leader in seven weeks and the first prime minister of color in its history.
The 42-year-old former chancellor of the Exchequer who is the son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Sunak won the contest to replace the ousted Liz Truss, who resigned under pressure last Thursday after her economic agenda caused turmoil.
King Charles III is returning to London this afternoon from Sandringham, the family’s country retreat in Norfolk. Rishi Sunak must see him to be officially installed as prime minister, after Liz Truss relinquishes the job.
Interesting that King Charles was in Sandringham this weekend? KC3 will have to meet with Sunak and this will be the first time that the prime minister has to kiss Charles’s hand and ask to form a government in his name. Liz Truss had to do the hand-kiss thing with QEII, I doubt she had to do it again for Charles (especially given that Truss arguably gave the kiss of death). Sunak’s big claim to fame recently was that he warned the Tory party that Truss’s economic policies would crash the British economy. Which they did. Still, people are mad because they want a f–king general election and they probably won’t get one for a while.
Photos courtesy of Justin Ng/UPPA/Avalon and Imageplotter/Avalon.
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- London, UK, 31st Aug 2022. Rishi Sunak. The final hustings in the Conservative Party leadership race, held at Wembley Arena, sees Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak compete to lead the party and become the next Prime Minister.,Image: 718137849, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Imageplotter / Avalon
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- Conservative MP Rishi Sunak arrives at BBC Broadcasting House, London, England, UK on Sunday 4 September, 2022 where he is a guest on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg Show,Image: 719333628, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: Please credit photographer and agency when publishing as Justin Ng/UPPA/Avalon., Model Release: no, Credit line: Justin Ng / Avalon
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- Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak arrive for the announcement of the winner of the Conservative Party Leadership Contest – QEII Convention Centre, London, England, UK on Monday 5 September, 2022.,Image: 719700248, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: Please credit photographer and agency when publishing as Justin Ng/UPPA/Avalon., Model Release: no, Credit line: Justin Ng / Avalon
They should get a general election but at least it isn’t another old white guy…which is more than I can say for the US right now.
Rishi being a person of colour makes no difference here. His policies are anti-working class and pro-white upper class.
100%. And the Tories are likely only allowing this in hopes they can use him a ‘token’ and people will be less hostile to their policies. Gross.
@Soapboxpudding This! They can also blame him for everything that goes wrong until the next election to keep all the white members’ hands clean and their voters would absolutely buy it.
Was coming down to the comments to say just this, Amy Bee. Thank you!
Yup. Frying pan meet fire.
The man is handsome as f***k and I can totally see myself having …
a political conversation with him.
@sugarhere well, they do call him Dishy Rishi after all 🙂
He is just as bad as the old white guys, cut taxes on the rich.
A British Asian PM is not inherently progressive. Amy coney Barrett: woman who is anti-reproductive rights. Clarence Thomas: black man who is anti-voting rights. Identity politics doesn’t work, people! Just because a PM is of Asian descent doesn’t mean he’s anti-racist! All his horrible politics further entrench racial and class oppression. Stop celebrating like this it’s a win! Because it’s not.
Thank you Naomi. It’s only when things are dire–the financial collapse before Obama or the Brexit reality / financial collapse pre Sunak–that these countries give the *others* a chance. Skin folks are not necessarily kin folks.
So will he ask his wife to bail out the UK? Her dad is like, richer than the Queen.
Exactly, he is possibly even posher than Boris. The 1% unfortunately tend to protect each other regardless (of nationality, ethnicity, race), the UK needs a solid social policy and to reinforce welfare but it won’t happen under the Tories, any of them.
Tories have had a 12 year run. The state of the UK is entirely on them and their policies.
That’s how it works in the US. Money buys you into the club regardless of titles or “pedigree.” Glad Britain is equally egalitarian. 🙄
Let’s nor forget he was pro-Brexit too.
If your ancestry is from the Commonwealth, supporting Brexit doesn’t seem any more or less weird than for the “white English.” Am I getting that wrong? I realize it was a vote of racism and xenophobia but it wasn’t a vote against immigration from the Commonwealth.
@Bettyrose, something that’s worth saying here, and that I think is exemplified really well by British Tories of immigrant descent in particular, is that they are very much the type to pull up the ladder after they’ve climbed it themselves, yanking away the opportunity for anyone else to climb up after them.
That’s the attitude on display with a lot of British Asians, like Rishi Sunak, who supported Brexit. It wasn’t just that they were voting against immigration from the EU. They were voting against immigration, period, even with the fact that they too were descended from, or are actually, immigrants themselves.
That’s not actually a contradiction when, again, you take into consideration the fact that they are the classic ladder-yankers galore. They don’t want to share their special, rareified status with any other immigrant that comes after them. That’s why you get people like Suella Braverman and Priti Patel and Sajid Javed in the Tory party in the UK. They don’t want to share. Much of the time, they also tend to come from fairly well-off communities back home as well, both economically and socially, and they are intentional in protecting the gains that they and others of their community have made. That’s a slightly more complicated discussion than what I can get into here, so I’ll leave it at that.
But yeah. British people who are immigrants or descended from immigrants from the CW can be just as fanatical about closing borders and preventing immigration to the UK as white British people, and the irony is absolutely not lost on them, bc they simply don’t see it as irony in the first place.
The real reason behind Brexit was because the EU was going to implement rules that tighten off shore money regulations. So the rich didn’t want to still be part of the EU. They just happened to play the racist peasants on the real reason.
So seeing as how Sunak is married to money (he’s likely doing well on his own but his wife’s family is mega money) that’s the reason why he was pro Brexit.
can’t reply to Nic’s comment but you’re right!
while a lot Brits voted stay, we know more than a few posh wealthy brexiteers- and not because of immigrants.
they cite the increasingly tight bureaucracy of the EU (not wrong- look what they did to the perfume industry by banning essential oils bc they’re “dangerous”- small example but the overreach is legendary) as well as not wanting to be economically tied (code for dont mess with my offshore money) to the EU.
I dont know what the future holds for the UK but the next 5-10 years post Brexit and our real live Wolf Hall power games within the House of Windsor should be plenty for popcorn nights.
He’s young, handsome, and Asian so he may last awhile if he doesn’t do anything stupid. Too bad he’s Tory.
And that pretty much sums it up. At the end of the day (and in less than 2 menstrual cycles) he’s still a Tory with a Tory agenda. He’s got 2 years to fix the mess his party created before the next general election. I hope for the sake of the UK, PM Sunak will do what’s right for the people over party, but I highly doubt it. He’s got a lot riding on his shoulders right now. He’s got to unite the party. He’s also got the lens of scrutiny on him more so than any other white leader, female or male, because of his background. The Tories don’t have any wiggle room here to fail anymore. If PM Sunak doesn’t deliver, I don’t think the British public will just skip merrily along with the Tories in power for the next 2 years.
Getting rid of unscheduled general elections turns out to have been a bad idea. When you hand as much power to a party as the UK system does, you need to have them always worried about losing it.
However bad the string of general elections being called one after the other was, this solution is worse.
@Concern Fae, we actually got rid of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act which Cameron brought in, the rules went back to how they used to be which is that we have to have an election every 5 years but can have one more often if the government calls it. The Tories could call a general election any time but they’d be crazy to do it now, with Labour 40 points ahead in the polls.
Is this the British version of the glass cliff? You know things have to VERY bad for them to give the job to the brown man.
Pretty much. Things were really chaotic and bad when Theresa May became PM, she was set for failure and to allow Bojo to seem like a last resort. Truss was a predictable trainwreck, so now they’re going for a brown man. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic
Just call for general elections already. Yes, the Tories will lose and they deserve it
@Little Red. love your comments, but yeah get the feeling it’s very bad in the UK and the Tories rn.
Little Red I’ll agree with you to a point, but I won’t be giving him a free pass. Let’s not forget as Chancellor he was in a position of power and helped to create this mess we’re now in. Johnson was a complete clown but, Sunak was right behind him; cheering him on.
This feels like “brown person please clean up the white mess and still enact the disastrous policies of our greedy corporate overlords.”
He may look brown, but that is all.
Nah, this comment is nagl. Like at all. Reconsider because it’s racist af.
Oh, no, not this time. Rishi is one of the creators of this catastrophy happening in UK
He is one of the greedy corporate overlords actually. He was the chancellor in Johnson’s government, too. He’s not a new, innocent face in politics by any metric.
He was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris’ government (second most powerful person in the government), so he is completely complicit in the mess we’re in. He is brown, but extremely rich and privileged, so his policies will do nothing to benefit the average person of colour.
It’s is a significant milestone in British history but one of the unsaid reasons he was rejected the first time because of his ethnicity. Some say he’s even more right wing than Boris. He’s richer than the King and I’m not sure Charles will be happy about that. It’s a shame that the Tories and not Labour are the ones to have the first female and now first person of colour as PM. He’s not going to have it easy though because all his decisions are going to be judged through the prism of his ethnic and religious background just like Obama.
I’ll add he doesn’t have the support of the right wing press. They supported Liz Truss the first time and then wanted Boris to return. So he’s going have to work hard to gain the support of the media establishment and that spells trouble for non-whites, the working class and immigrants.
And trans people.
Excellent summary @AmyBee
The racist comments on Sunak on the Daily Mail were just sickening.
Well, we shall see what happens. I’ve seen that brown and black folks on the island don’t really like PM Sunak. What a whirlwind huh?
My impression was that most of the good ol’ boys wanted BoJo back, but there was enough opposition within the party to risk a general election (which they would lose) if they pushed him through. I think Sunak is the country’s best hope at the moment and am happy with this. He is more realistic about the economy and UK’s diminished position on the world stage.
In a nutshell, Johnson needed 100 MPs to support him to participate in the party election, and it seems like he only found 60 (although that in itself is outrageous, given the kind of man he is). Sunak was the only one to have 100, so they bypassed the whole party elections bit and gave him the job.
Which I assume it means that most people didn’t want to (openly) support Johnson, so at least that is a small win. Although Sunak is really not that big an improvement overall.
I’m talking more about the gossip behind the scenes that I’m hearing.
Sunak is much more capable in terms of delivering what the good old boys want vis-a-vis the economy than Liz Truss, or even Boris Johnson, was capable of. Boris Johnson was a self-aggrandizing liability. Liz Truss was just plain bad at her real job, which is to line the pockets of the already rich and wealthy.
Sunak is smart enough and capable enough to not alienate the electorate while he’s putting in place policies that will enrich the people who want to be enriched. People like his father-in-law, for example, who is a billionaire. He’s the precise sort of mild-mannered middle-manager that India is really good at producing these days. He’ll make the bitter policies go down with a spoon full of sugar. But they will go down. And it will hurt the British people.
Unfair to castigate his in laws merely because they are billionaires. They are hugely philanthropic, have set up multiple charities and live humbly. Sunak had a childhood much like mine, middle class parents who were not poor but worked bloody hard all hours of the day to get me through private school. I do not support his politics though!
Well that’s certainly some way of covering the sad sad news.
On par with celebrating the first-ever female PM in Italy because it’s such a win for women.
Rishi is to brown people what Kanye is to black people, except at least Ye wasn’t born into it.
Couldn’t have put it better!
“On par with celebrating the first-ever female PM in Italy because it’s such a win for women.”
Exactly this, 100%.
A Tory is still a Tory at the end of the day and considering his background and views I am not holding out hope for him.
I know I know. It’s great to have a British-Indian PM and that’s a win in its own right but again, I am worried. Even if he’s the best the Tories have.
I mean, d’you look at Bobby Jindal and go « yay, that’s a win for minorities right there »?
I literally have a “But I am worried” below that statement and my first paragraph is criticising him.
What will it take for a general election to be called? This is a perversion of the word democracy they really should stop using it.
If the Tories were sure that they were going to win, they would call an election. But all the polls say they would be destroyed so they refuse to do it. This time party members didn’t even get to choose the new PM
He doesn’t have the full backing of the tabloid press as I would’ve suspected. Dan Wootton appears to despise him. When it all goes to hell, it’ll get ugly. I already see crazy things posted him and his wife on twitter.
Yeah, he’s ex-Goldman Sachs and crazy wealthy and, you know, a TORY. Definitely not a win for the working class or majority of POC. He seems slightly more intelligent than Truss but I am still betting he’s going to balance the budget via austerity, not raising taxes on the rich or anything else even remotely progressive.
Rishi is one of those minority UK politicians who sees racism going on and will deny that it’s racism. This is not a win for people of colour.
Seconded.
Happy Diwali, everybody!
I’m no fan of Rishi Sunak, and I’m no fan of the Tories. I hate the whole pack of them, lock, stock, and barrel, and he’s included in that list.
But the fact that an Indian man won the leadership of Winston Churchill’s party, and took what used to be Winston Churchill’s job as Prime Minister? There’s a part of hell where the lights are just extra bright today, for Diwali, bc ol’ Winston C must be SPINNING in his grave with barely coherent and barely suppressed rage, lmao.
Outside of that? I’m not into it.
Love your comments A and agree with every word.
Happy Diwali to all who celebrate!!
I agree entirely
Love this for Winston.
He’s a massively wealthy Tory. It’s not good. He’s going to harm other Asian-Brits bigtime, along with everyone else who isn’t rich, so no, this is not something to celebrate. I don’t know how Britain is going to come back from the hole the Tories have dug them into, but another Tory is sure not gonna do it.
Sunak has not been transparent with his finances, and his hedge fund background raises questions about his commitment to fighting against increased taxation. He’s run a slick marketing campaign which played down his ultra-privileged background, but he’s a committed Thatcherite. Between he and his wife they have more money than god which doesn’t send a good signal to the middle and lower classes — last year he was lambasted for axing a £20-a-week increase to Universal Credit that could had helped some of the poorest families through the pandemic. More than 200,000 may have been pushed into poverty as a result of the cut. This man will NOT make a good PM and the next couple of years will be dire.
it’s funny, when the conservatives were voting to replace bojo, i actually thought he should have been the PM. i was honestly so baffled this entire time how truss won at all.
I think Truss did exactly what she was supposed to. Like Theresa May, the Tories sent her in to manage a no-win situation and go down with the ship. After which they would install a man to deal with the still-no-win-but-slightly-diffused-situation and look like the capable hero. I think in both cases the man was meant to be BoJo but that was too hard a pill to ask the public to swallow the second time around.
This will still be a nightmare. The Tories are completely removed from the average Brit’s day-to-day reality.
It will be interesting to watch. I hope public opinion forces a general election. And I hope we in the US do the right thing in November. I’d really like to be able to take a deep breath and relax in 2023 but this just never ends does it?
Wouldn’t having Bojo back in charge make the UK the laughingstock of the EU?
We are not even the laughingstock of the EU any longer. They don’t even bother to notice us any more. They are focused on Franco-German relations, the Ukraine war and the fascists in Italy. Our sad trials are not even an afterthought for our EU friends (please still be our friend).
It’s great to finally see a brown person be PM of England. However, it seems this was forced. Like they had no choice so he got the job. The pressure is on for him though. Anything he doesn’t get right, his ethnicity will be blamed. It’s ironic though isn’t it? The British enslaved Indians, raped Indian women, looted the country. Now the national dish of England is curry and the PM is Indian lol. Nice payback !
Is this really payback–this symbolism–when England stole TRILLIONS from India?
✊🏾
Set up to lose the next election.
It also crossed my mind that they picked first a woman and now a brown guy to blame an election loss on.
Bold of you to assume he will last long enough for the next election.
He’s a slimeball, but he should have been chosen instead of Liz Truss 45 days ago.
I absolutely despise everything Rishi Sunak believes in and I will be shocked if he manages to get them out of the hole they’ve created for themselves. BUT, as a brown person, the fact that he is brown is amazing and so wonderful for kids to look up to and see themselves in. I don’t respect his politics, but seeing diverse faces in positions of power is such a big deal. Not just as the sidekicks, best friends and Chancellors who are never quite enough, but as the Prime Ministers, Presidents, CEOs and, dare I say, even Duchesses…..Shubh Diwali all.
Happy Diwali lovely!!! I’m Black but I agree with you x
Well glad to see that crappy politics are crappy politics no matter what or where and that the 1% is gonna 1% at the expense of the rest of us.
On a shallow note, Liz Truss “kissed hands” with QE2 who promptly thought F this and checked out ( paraphrasing Kaiser with apologies) and that’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
I wish we could have gotten Trump as quickly as they got rid of Truss (and Johnson– he’s not starting riots in Parliament). I know nothing about this new guy, but he sure is a looker. I hope he helps the British people and succeeds, if that’s possible. Good luck, England.
First he’s a Tory and as someone stated above Rishi is to brown people what Kanye is to black people .
Not really though. Rishi has real governmental power, Kanye is wealthy rapper who sells sneakers and clothing.
He stole billions of dollars from Britain’s Covid funds to spread about to his friends. He is one of the people most directly responsible for the state Britain’s in right now. He’s not only a Tory ghoul — he’s one of the worst Tory ghouls to ever exist.
People understand that you hire the brown or Black person who wants to prove they’re even more into neoliberalism, austerity, racial capitalism and fascism than you are to manage the burning ship, right? It’s a standard move. They go even harder than the hard right white conservatives to prove themselves.
Sorry he’s a dud. I was hoping otherwise. Both our countries are going through bad shit now.
Am loving the comments, here. (Second them, all—except for Dishi Rishi. I think he’s quite homely.) Let the racists go apeshit.
Happy Diwali, everyone!
He really looks like a good guy, but alas, British Celebitches say he is not. So unfortunate for England. Are there ANY good Tories?