Akshata Murty has admitted she has stopped engaging regularly with the news in an effort not to be “consumed” by living at No 10, in a rare solo interview as the next general election approaches.
The prime minister’s wife told the Times she found the coverage of her and her husband, Rishi Sunak, bizarre at times, highlighting how he recently made front-page news by wearing a pair of Adidas Samba trainers.
“I try not to [read the news] now because it is so much more personal,” she said. Regarding the coverage of her husband’s footwear, she said: “I had no clue. Rishi has always worn Sambas. You kind of have to live your life and not let it consume you.”
In a wide-ranging interview, the Indian businesswoman, whose personal wealth makes the occupants of No 10 Downing Street richer than King Charles, described a “routine” life, days after the Conservatives saw heavy losses in local elections.
Another, unnamed, Downing Street wife told the Times: “It’s hard to continue with your career when you are so scrutinised, and you’re expected to drop everything for a state opening. Yet, if you become too involved in your spouse’s life, you are seen as meddling.”
Scrutiny is far from unfamiliar territory for Murty and Sunak, who have a combined fortune of about £730m and have previously been in the headlines over Murty’s non-domiciled tax status, which allowed her to save millions of pounds in tax on dividends collected from her family’s IT business empire, Infosys.
Last year a Guardian analysis found that Sunak’s fund to support startups during the Covid pandemic, when he was chancellor, had invested almost £2m in companies linked to his wife. The prime minister was also found to be in breach of the parliamentary code of conduct after failing to declare his wife’s interest in a childcare agency that stood to benefit from government policy.
“I am not a politician. I can’t always please everyone. My father told me the softest pillow is a clear conscience. Do your best and then you don’t worry. So that’s my role. To keep the show going,” Murty told the Times as she welcomed schoolchildren into Downing Street for her Lessons at 10 initiative, which takes place every Friday morning.
“I try very hard to keep life as routine as possible. I also look at this time in our lives as an opportunity to serve, and you serve in the best way you can. That is my mindset.”
The interview came after the government’s defeats in local elections and after two of Sunak’s MPs crossed the floor to join Labour in the past two weeks. With Keir Starmer’s party consistently ahead in the polls since the start of 2022 and with a general election looming, Sunak has said he is “absolutely determined to fight”, despite many of his MPs being despondent about the Tories’ chances of retaining power.
In a recent joint interview with Grazia UK, the couple bemoaned one another’s bed-making and dishwasher-loading habits at home, where they raise their two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka.
“I have more flexibility and so I’m able to control my schedule a bit more, whereas you don’t have flex or time,” Murty said.
Murty, who was born in India, spent most of her early adulthood in Los Angeles. She went to the city’s private, liberal Claremont McKenna College, where she studied economics and French, before studying at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.
She worked for Deloitte and Unilever and then studied for an MBA at Stanford University, where she met Sunak, who had won a prestigious Fulbright scholarship. Within five years, they were married in a two-day ceremony in Bengaluru.
“I remember meeting Rishi at 24 and later I’d visit him here when we were dating and we’d come to Westminster as tourists. I still didn’t imagine living in London. Even when Rishi was a new MP, I never thought five years later we’d be here,” she said.
At one point during the Times interview, a parent of a visiting child to No 10 said she wanted to ask Murty about Sunak’s Rwanda deportation policy, which would deport asylum seekers who arrive in the UK by irregular means to Kigali, but refrained because she thought it would seem rude in the face of Murty’s kindness.
“I’m not the elected politician,” Murty said when asked political questions. “I’m the wife.”
• This article was originally published on 11 May 2024 with the headline “Scrutiny makes it hard to have career in No 10, says Akshata Murty”. This headline, and some of the original article text, was based on the misunderstanding that a quote beginning “It’s hard to continue with your career when you are so scrutinised …” was said by Akshata Murty, rather than an unnamed Downing Street wife. The article headline and text has been amended accordingly.
