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IAN GALLAGHER: Rishi Sunak has been 'plotting since Christmas'

por Taylor Courts (27-08-2022)


Everyone loves a tale of triumph over adversity.
And these days a humble-origins back story is a trusty weapon in the politician's arsenal. If you can boast a tower-block childhood and a single mother or, like Rishi Sunak, an aspirational story of migrants striving hard to improve their life, then so much the better.

Anyone listening with half an ear to his slick ‘Ready for Rishi' pitch for Prime Minister would have heard that his path to the Government's top tier was not the breeze we thought.

He spoke of his grandmother coming to Britain ‘armed with hope for a better life', who saved ‘enough money for her husband and children to follow her'.

We heard, too, of the sacrifices made by Rishi's father, a doctor, and his mother, a pharmacist. ‘My family gave me opportunities they could only dream of,' he said.

TO THE MANOR BORN: The Sunaks' sprawling manor house in North Yorkshire

Not quite everything was sacrificed - his parents employed a gardener at their comfortable Southampton home - but it is Rishi's hope that everyone should ‘have those same opportunities to be able to give their children a better future'.

Admirable stuff.

Social mobility exemplified.But what exactly were the opportunities he skirted over in his glitzy video? The breaks that helped propel his vertiginous ascent, enabling him to afford a home in Santa Monica, a £6.6 million mews house in Kensington, a sprawling manor house in North Yorkshire and a London flat for visiting relatives?