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Britain's New Prime Minister Is Surprisingly American
By Andy Serwer with Dylan Croll
Maybe you’ve glossed over the wild news coming out of the UK recently, but it’s actually important stuff, especially as it concerns the country’s new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, whose backstory has deep and surprising American ties.
I’ll get to that good stuff on Sunak in a second, but first a word about the bond between America and England. France or Israel might believe they have a special relationship with the US—but they’re fighting for second place. We’ve had ties with England going back to the ill-fated Virginia colony in 1584 and over the ensuing five centuries no country has been closer.
Winston Churchill described the US-UK relationship as "special" in a 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri with President Harry Truman. True, we have a few differences: cold beer vs. warm beer, color vs. color, football vs. football. But we have much more in common. The US and UK share a love of the British royal family and amazing cross-cultural mashups when it comes to rock music, fashion and TV.
Economic ties between the world’s first and sixth biggest economies—behind India, Germany, Japan and China—play a crucial role, too. The US and UK serve as each other's No. 1 source of direct foreign investment, according to the US embassy in the UK website .
There’s more to it than that, says Wall Street investor Ann Berry, a Brit who has a Harvard MBA. The US needs all of the allies it can get in light of tensions with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China, she notes.
“Historical ally-ship is becoming more relevant in the modern world, because global allegiances are becoming less transparent, more transient, more transactional," she said. "I think the UK is still a friend to the US, I think it will remain a friend to us. And it's still an interpreter on this side of the Atlantic when it comes to figuring out how to play in Europe.”
The UK is facing significant economic issues, some due to universal supply demand imbalances , others due to circumstances particular to the UK, some of which stem from Brexit, or leaving the EU, almost two years ago now. That resulted in multinational companies moving their European headquarters out of London , shortages of labor and trade friction. The soaring dollar and high energy prices are inflicting more pain.
This troubled economy falls in the lap of Britain’s new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, (pronounced REE-she SUE-nack) leader of the Tory party, which has been in power for 12 years. He's taking over for Liz Truss, whose rocky term as Britain's prime minister ended after just six weeks amid extreme market volatility.
Sunak’s financial expertise should prove invaluable in this new role, and markets have already stabilized. In addition to having links to the financial world, the new PM also has deep connections to the US.
The new prime minister is a man of many firsts. At 42, he’s the youngest PM since William Pitt (the Younger), who took office in 1783 at the age of 24. Sunak, who was born in the United Kingdom, is the first PM of Indian heritage. He’s also the first former hedge fund executive, the first to have a Stanford MBA, and the first to have worked at Goldman Sachs.
Let’s take a closer look at some of those American connections. After graduating from Oxford in 2001, Rishi joined Goldman in London as an analyst, where for a time he sat next to the aforementioned Ann Berry.
“He was very smart, analytical, very articulate and a really pleasant character,” she says. “He was very focused, even then, on making sure that he was doing something that had a broader impact."
Sunak left Goldman and went to Stanford on a Fulbright scholarship where he received an MBA in 2006. There’s some color on his Stanford days in a biography of Sunak published in 2020 (how many 40-year-olds warrant that?) titled (one hopes not literally) “Going for Broke” written by Lord Michael Ashcroft, a 76-year-old billionaire businessman and Tory politician. Ashcroft writes that Silicon Valley dazzled Sunak, and that he once commented on how it was possible to take a 10-minute drive through the Bay Area and pass hundreds of businesses that have changed people's lives.
The book speaks to the rigors of Stanford, and one of his classmates, Maria Anguiano, told the author: “Rishi coped very well. He was always very positive.” Another student there at the time, Rashad Bartholomew, remembers serious partying, but noted that Sunak didn’t drink but did sometimes join some low-stakes poker games.
After graduating from Stanford's business school, Sunak worked at hedge funds in London including The Children’s Investment Fund (known as TCI), run by British billionaire Chris Hohn, described to me as “a fascinating guy who’s a massive risk taker,” by a British hedge fund manager. At one time Hohn was doing activist investing that included targeting American railroad CSX, which traces its origins to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (or B&O) , the oldest in the United States. The stake in CSX ended up becoming a tangled affair and ended badly for TCI. Sunak worked on the CSX investment and his role was mentioned in litigation.
Sunak is extremely wealthy, the bulk of which comes from his wife, Akshata Murthy , a graduate of Claremont McKenna, whom he met at Stanford, and the daughter of billionaire founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy. Akshata owns .93% of Infosys worth some $700 million , according to Business Today, an Indian magazine. Infosys’s primary business has been to outsource thousands of US jobs to India , or replace jobs in the US with foreign nationals. It has also repeatedly knocked heads with US regulators .
But wait—there’s more Americana via the Murthys. Through Akshata and her family’s businesses, Sunak also has ties to companies that operate Wendy’s in India and a joint venture with Amazon in India, according to an investigation by the Guardian.
Finally, Sunak even had a US green card at one point, according to the BBC. He still has a luxury apartment in Santa Monica , the Guardian reports.
The point I'm making is that Sunak’s connections to America are as significant and singular as Britain’s itself, and in fact, reflect the changing nature of our relationship with England.
Think about it this way: In the 19th century our ties were mostly commercial, perhaps best symbolized by Andrew Carnegie , the Scottish-born American steel baron noted for his philanthropy in the US and British empire. In the 20th century our military alliance with the UK was paramount, with Winston Churchill, much-loved by Americans, (and reciprocated to a degree) as emblematic of that bond. And now in the 21st century, with finance ascendent, who better than Sunak, a former Wall Street guy with an American MBA, to be the latest representation of Anglo-Americanism.
Rishi Sunak: As British/American as steak and kidney—and apple—pie. Morning Brief
