Rishi Sunak wins race to become the UK’s new prime minister

Sunak wins Conservative Party leadership contest days after the dramatic resignation of Liz Truss as prime minister.

Rishi Sunak will become the United Kingdom’s new prime minister after winning the ruling Conservative Party’s leadership contest triggered by the dramatic resignation of Liz Truss last week.

Sunak’s win on Monday came days after Truss’s resignation following her disastrous tax cuts plans and policy U-turns plunged the markets into chaos. The unprecedented economic crisis drew a rare intervention from the Bank of England.

Sunak was to make his first remarks at 2:30 pm (13:30 GMT), according to Party official Graham Brady, whose 1922 committee of Tory MPs organised a rapid leadership election following last week’s resignation of Truss.

He has been left with the task of steering a deeply divided country through an economic downturn set to leave millions of people poorer.

Al Jazeera’s Andrew Simmons, reporting from London, said Sunak is “pretty well placed” despite the challenges ahead.

“In some ways … some of his paid work has already been done in terms of putting out the fires that Liz Truss created – because it did cause a storm in the markets,” Simmons said.

“The whole list of tax cuts, and ideas that frankly, according to Sunak and others belongs to Disneyland, because none of it was going to be really possible without crashing the economy more,” he said.

Aljazeera