In 2009, Sunak co-founded Thélème Partners. He worked at Thélème from 2009 until 2013 when he left to enter politics.[6] In what is "perhaps a coincidence, but an intriguing one nonetheless"[7], Thelema is also the occult spiritual philosophy and new religious movement founded in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley.[8]
Thélème Partners invested $500 million in Moderna. In November 2020, as soon as Moderna announced its Covid jab "could be up to 94.5 per cent effective," the UK immediately did a deal to buy five million doses. Sunak was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time.[9] As of 2022, the market value of Thélème’s shareholding, at $915 million, made it the 6th top institutional investor in Moderna.[7]
Thélème Partners is owned 75% or more by Theleme Services Ltd, which again is controlled by the Frenchman Patrick Degorce.[10][11] In 2011, Degorce was one of the earliest investors in Moderna, when Moderna only had about ten employees and a market value of around $125 million.[12]
Personal
Rishi Sunak is a Hindu, and took his oath as an MP at the House of Commons on the Bhagavad Gita. In August 2009, he married Akshata Murty, the daughter of the Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, the founder of the technology company Infosys. Akshata Murty owns a 0.91% stake—valued at about $900m (£746m) in April 2022—in Infosys, making her one of the wealthiest women in Britain.[13] One of the "Independent Directors" of Infosys is Uri Levine[14], who formerly served in the Israeli technology spook outfit Unit 8200.[15]
Sunak and Murty met while studying at Stanford University; they have two daughters. Murty is a director of her father's investment firm, Catamaran Ventures. They own Kirby Sigston Manor in the village of Kirby Sigston, North Yorkshire, as well as a mews house in Earl's Court in central London, a flat on the Old Brompton Road, South Kensington, and a penthouse apartment on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California. Sunak is a teetotaller, and has stated he is a fan of Coca-Cola. He was previously a governor of the East London Science School. Sunak has a Labrador called Nova and is a cricket, tennis and horse racing enthusiast.[16]
Sunak's brother Sanjay is a psychologist. His sister Raakhi is the Chief of Strategy and Planning at Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations global fund for education. Sunak is close friends with The Spectator's political editor James Forsyth, whom he has known since their school days. Sunak was the best man at Forsyth's wedding to the journalist Allegra Stratton, and they are godparents to each other's children. In April 2022, it was reported that Sunak and Murty had moved out of 11 Downing Street to a newly refurbished West London home. The Sunday Times Rich List 2022 named Sunak and Murty the 222nd wealthiest people in the UK, with an estimated combined wealth of £730 million, making Sunak the "first frontline politician to join the rich list".[17]
In a televised debate during the UK/2019 General Election campaign, Labour's Rebecca Long-Bailey rubbished Rishi Sunak, representing the Tories, when he said the last Labour government had crashed the economy:
“We suffered a world banking crisis: your Chancellor (Sajid Javid) was working at Deutsche Bank, selling the very derivatives that caused the crash in the first place."[18]
And she rubbished his claims about the impact of Labour’s plans, retorting:
"Secondly, when you talk about reckless spending plans, I think you were referred to recently in the media talking about the figure of £1.2 trillion spends which is a fabricated lie that the Conservative Party have been perpetrating over the last few weeks. We're the only party with a credible and detailed costing plan, to outline our plans and I haven't seen any costings for your party whatsoever."[19]
On 5 July 2023, Giles Wilkes wrote an article entitled "Ashes to Ashes: Is Rishi Sunak taking Britain back to the 1980s?" in The New European, which concluded:
"Britain was once a place that could imagine progress and drive towards it. We knew we could do better, and saw examples of this just across the Channel. Even in the UK, it was normal to expect each generation to be better off than the one before. Both sides of politics still believed this was within reach, if only the right policies could be enacted. The cocktail of difficult reforms put together by the Thatcher government had a point to them – the transformation of Britain into a more entrepreneurial, free-market and outward-looking place. This involved a heap of pain, but it wasn’t pain for its own sake. Of course, much of it was too harsh, and clumsily or even cruelly delivered, but it also contained positive ideas like the European single market and reforms that (under New Labour) did finally help to end the scourge of ever-rising inflation and unemployment. There was something for subsequent governments to build on.
"The pain that 'we' have to take today is of a different kind. Britons are now facing higher inflation and interest rates than in Germany, Italy, France or Spain because we have embarked upon a programme of regression. It will take years to disentangle all the factors, including the recovery from Covid and the Bank of England’s missteps. But I think stubborn inflation partly demonstrates how the motor of progress has been sabotaged. In the years since the Brexit referendum, investment has been weaker, the flow of immigrant labour seriously disrupted, and our supply chains crudely reconfigured. Brexit has led to a weaker economy and less revenue for the Treasury, and consequently under-resourced public services. Higher inflation is one way an economy displays its weakness. The metaphorical engine of the economy is beginning to sputter and smoke, and that squealing is the sound of us having to jam down the interest-rate brake harder than the rest.
"Forty years ago, Britain led the world in economic reforms. Today, as Bidenomics propels the US into a manufacturing boom, we are left fretting about whether we have the funds to be a follower. Under Thatcher, sharply higher rates were part of a policy to drive the country into a better place. Today, they are just a painful acknowledgement that we have fallen into a worse one."[24]
UK 2024 Election
Sunak faced a very tough election campaign for the UK 2024 General Election. One of his most notorious ideas was threatening to revoke young people's driving licenses and 'access to finance' as possible sanctions for refusing national service.[25]
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