Rishi Sunak is seeking his own public mandate at next month’s general election having been installed as Conservative leader and UK prime minister by his own colleagues in parliament. The 44-year-old former financier was tasked with stabilising the UK economy, and his own notoriously fractious party, when he succeeded Liz Truss in October 2022 after her 49-day premiership imploded. Sunak has succeeded up to a point on the former but failed to stop bitter Tory infighting, while polls say he is one of the UK’s most unpopular leaders ever and likely to lose the July 4 vote. “The more people see of Sunak, the less they like him in some ways,” Tim Bale, author of a book about the right-wing Conservatives since Brexit, told AFP on Sunak’s first anniversary as premier last year. Since then Sunak has had little to celebrate, lurching from one failed leadership reset to another as he has unsuccessfully tried to claw back support from Keir Starmer’s resurgent Labour party. A recent poll even put the anti-immigration Reform UK party of Nigel Farage just ahead of the Tories. Sunak has been criticised for lacking political nous, particularly after he left the 80th anniversary of D-Day events early, causing widespread outrage. He has apologised repeatedly since and even had to deny that he was on the verge of quitting before polling day. ‘Dishy Rishi’ The privately wealthy Sunak has struggled to connect with regular voters struggling with a cost-of-living crisis. He was roundly mocked for suggesting he had an austere childhood because his family did not have satellite television, while his interactions with voters have often seemed awkward. His current political difficulties are a far cry from his rapid rise to power, becoming Britain’s youngest prime minister of modern times at age 42, as well as the first of South Asian descent. The observant Hindu was born in Southampton on England’s south coast on May 12, 1980 to a family doctor father and mother who ran a local pharmacy. Sunak’s grandparents were from Punjab in northern India and emigrated to Britain from eastern Africa in the 1960s, arriving with “very little”, he has said. Sunak was educated at the exclusive private Winchester College, then Oxford and Stanford universities. During his run for the Tory leadership, a video emerged of a 21-year-old Sunak talking about his friends.