Rishi Sunak has officially become Britain’s 57th prime minister today, Tuesday, vowing to fix the mistakes made by his predecessor, Liz Truss, and to regain the trust of British voters after months of political upheaval.
“I will place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda,” Sunak said in his first address as leader in front of 10 Downing Street. Minutes earlier, he met King Charles III at Buckingham Palace and formally became the country’s fifth prime minister in six years. “That work begins immediately.”
The 42-year-old son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Sunak won the Conservative Party contest to replace Ms. Truss on Monday, just six weeks after she took power. Now, he confronts the twin challenge of reunifying his fractured party and navigating Britain through its gravest economic crisis in a generation.
Though he was elected with only the votes of about 200 Conservative lawmakers, Mr. Sunak rejected suggestions that he did not have a political mandate.
A former chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Sunak is expected to pull Britain back to more mainstream policies after Ms. Truss’s failed experiment in trickle-down economics, which rattled financial markets and damaged Britain’s fiscal reputation. Her policies were not born of bad intentions, he said, but he described them as “mistakes nonetheless.”
Beyond promising to unite the country and fix the economy. Sunak first cabinet appointments on Tuesday will provide an early clue of how he hopes to lead Britain out of one of its current crisis.
