When we were ruled as part of the British Empire, we in the colonies were told that we had to be “tutored” to govern ourselves. After WWII, most colonies gradually achieved independence and now govern ourselves with varying degrees of success and failure. Some question whether the fault lie with the teacher, the students, the pedagogy or the substance of the lessons. During the colonial era, many citizens of the empire defined as “British subjects” emigrated to Britain generally to provide labour.
By 2022, it appears that the citizens of the Empire were not only ready to govern themselves but their descendants in Britain might be ready to lead the “Mother Country”. There are .5 million of these from the Caribbean, but they are dwarfed by those from India (1.5 million) and Pakistan (.5 million). Their participation in politics has been slowly building to where we now have a person of Indian origin, Rishi Sunak as one of five individuals vying to succeed Conservative Party PM Boris Johnson, who resigned last week.
The Conservative Party’s procedure for choosing their new leader is for their MPs to nominate and then vote for one of eight candidates. The ones with the lowest number of votes or less than 30 are eliminated after each round until two remain. These will then go to the hustings to court the 200,000 registered members of the party to make the final decision on September 5. Two rounds of voting have seen three competitors knocked out of the race. Attorney General Suella Braverman, who is also of Indian origin, was eliminated last Thursday and has since given her backing to Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. At this time ,the most likely person to remain in the race, along with Sunak, is projected to be Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, who interestingly enough is the bookmakers’ favourite to go all the way, even though she is a relative newcomer and political lightweight compared to Sunak.
But who is Rishi Sunak and what are his chances of actually succeeding Boris Johnson to actually become Prime Minister for the remainder of his term? His grandparents were part of the Indian populace in British India who were recruited to serve the labour needs of the Empire. There were two types: the 465,000 indentured labourers who, for instance, were sent to the West Indies of which 239,000 ended up in British Guiana. The other type were “passenger immigrants” who paid their way. Sunak’s grandparents were of the second type and ended up in Kenya and other colonies in East Africa. They emigrated to Britain in the 1960s just before Idi Amin had expelled all of their ilk in 1972 from Uganda and worked in “administrative jobs”.
Sunak’s parents became part of the immigrant middle class when his father swotted to become a medical doctor and his mother a pharmacist with her own neighbourhood pharmacy over which they also lived. They, in turn, scrimped to send Sunak to one of the most prestigious (and expensive) grammar schools in England – Winchester and then on to Oxford to read for the very competitive Bachelors in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). A Fulbright scholarship took him to Stanford in California for an MBA that got him into the top investment house Goldman Sachs and then into private hedge funds where he would earn his fortune. But the Stanford stint also saw him getting hitched to the daughter of the founder of Infosys, the second richest men in India. His wife’s 1% share of Infosys stocks makes her richer than the Queen of England and together the richest family to enter British politics.
This he did after his return to the UK in 2009 and he was elected to Parliament from a safe Tory seat in 2015. As a backer first of PM Theresa May on Brexit and then of PM Johnson after her exit, he was appointed first Secretary of the Treasury and then Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.
Yet, Peggy Mordaunt is a clear favourite to beat him among Conservative voters.
