King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace
(Picture: PA)King Charles crowned Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister on a historic day for Britain.
His Majesty appointed Mr Sunak as premier, the first British Asian to reach the top job in UK politics and the youngest since the Napoleonic Wars more than 200 years ago.
Mr Sunak’s political coronation took place as he was the only contender to get the backing of 100 MPs to enter the contest to be Tory leader after Liz Truss resigned after just 44 days in office, becoming the shortest-serving PM ever.
The ex-chancellor headed to Buckingham Palace mid-morning where the king asked him to form a government.
With the world watching the maelstrom in British politics which has seen three prime ministers in 50 days, US president Joe Biden hailed Mr Sunak’s appointment as “a ground-breaking milestone” which “matters”.
Mr Sunak, 42, is the first PM that the king appointed, with his late mother Queen Elizabeth having seen 15 premiers during her 70-year reign, although Winston Churchill was already in office when she acceded to the throne in 1952.
After the recent chaos at the heart of government and financial turmoil, former Home Office minister Victoria Atkins told Times Radio: “We can be extremely proud of the fact that we have now got a Prime Minister who not only has the character, and the decency, and the brains and the vision to do this job really well, but we should also be quietly proud that he is also the first British Asian Prime Minister that we will be seeing walk into No10 as well.”
Mr Sunak’s grandparents were from Punjab state before the Indian subcontinent was divided into two countries, India and Pakistan, in 1947 after British colonial rule ended. His family settled in the UK in the Sixties and he was born in Southampton in 1980.
Shadow Treasury minister Pat McFadden said it was a “big and positive milestone” for the country to have its first Prime Minister of British-Asian origin.
However, Labour is calling for a general election after the political and economic mayhem under Ms Truss, following the tumultuous Boris Johnson administration, claiming Mr Sunak’s government has no mandate from voters. Ms Truss held her final Cabinet meeting this morning before making a speech of just over three minutes in Downing Street.
With her husband Hugh, daughters Frances and Liberty, a small group of her supporters including Deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey, and No10 staff gathered in the street, she defended to the last a “bold” approach to politics but failed to apologise for her economic strategy which included Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget saga.
Then Ms Truss headed to Buckingham Palace for a resignation audience with the king. Cabinet ministers had filed into No10 not knowing if they would be in their job by the end of the day, with a number of them expected to get the chop as Mr Sunak forms a “government of all the talents” to try to unite his warring party.
Mr Sunak has been urged to avoid Ms Truss’s perceived error of appointing loyalists to key roles, with James Cleverly calling for the overhauled Cabinet to feature the best ministers. The Foreign Secretary told Sky News: “We have got to have the first 15 on the pitch. I know that Rishi understands that.”
Mr Sunak will look to build a Cabinet of “all the talents” that will see the political return of the “adults”, according to reports. While his team remained tight-lipped about the possible Cabinet composition, long-time backers Dominic Raab, the former justice secretary, Commons Treasury committee chairman Mel Stride and ex-chief whip Mark Harper were tipped to be in it.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who was brought in to steady Ms Truss’s ailing government and has been working towards a highly-anticipated Halloween fiscal statement, is widely expected to keep the keys to No11 to try to stabilise the jittery markets.
Penny Mordaunt, who bowed out of the race to hand Mr Sunak a spectacular political comeback as she failed to get the 100 nominations from Tory MPs, is expected to get a promotion. Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith stressed that “there is a great desire to stop now having an argument in an empty room”. He added: “He needs now to make it clear to his party — my party — that we can no longer indulge in debates about policy, we’ve just got to get on with governing.”
However, millionaire Mr Sunak will be plunged into a series of immediate and fraught decisions on how to plug a black hole, possibly of £40 billion, in Britain’s public finances.
The former Goldman Sachs analyst and ex-hedge fund manager will almost inevitably face resistance from some Tories if he ditches Ms Truss’s pledge to spend three per cent of GDP on defence by 2030. But he faces a series of huge challenges including the cost-of-living crisis, with new figures showing the cost of some “budget” food items soaring by more than 50 per cent in a year, an NHS crisis with seven million people on waiting lists as winter approaches, energy bills soaring, and the Ukraine war. With the Tories trailing Labour by more than 20 points in the polls, senior MP Robert Halfon said the they might get “one last chance” from the public, if they are “lucky”, with the next election expected in 2024.
