Roving Periscope: Johnson to step down; Infosys chief’s son-in-law Sunak may succeed him as British PM

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: In 2010, India-born British business owner Sanjiv Mehta bought, revived the East India Company dissolved in 1874, and turned it into a brand selling luxury coffee, tea, and food.

Twelve years later, Indian-origin leader Rishi Sunak is in the race to succeed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has lost the confidence of nearly 50 lawmakers of his Conservative Party within hours over alleged sexual misconduct by one of his cronies.

On Thursday, Johnson agreed to step down from the post in the wake of mass resignations and loss of trust in his leadership.

Ironically, Sunak, the 42-year-old son-in-law of Infosys founder NR Narayan Murthy, was picked by the man he may succeed. Johnson had appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer, a full Cabinet position, in February 2020.

In his resignation letter on Wednesday, Sunak said he was quitting because he expected the government to be run “properly, competently and seriously”. Which was another way of saying that Boris Johnson has been improper, incompetent, and frivolous as Prime Minister!

But that is a perception many Britons, including his party MPs, widely shared.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who also quit along with Sunak, said the government is neither doing the right thing nor is it popular. That too has been clear for some time both within the party and outside of it.

The immediate provocation for these mass resignations was the disclosures over Conservative MP Chris Pincher, who stepped down from his role as party whip after confessing to drunkenly groping two males at the Conservative Party club.

The issue would have petered out, but for the PM’s office, which insisted there had been no specific allegation against Pincher. The MPs knew Johnson was aware of Pincher’s proclivities before appointing him, as the party whip inflamed the controversy.

On Tuesday, it came to a head when a former top bureaucrat, Simon McDonald, smashed the façade of untruths and revealed that Pincher had faced allegations of groping male colleagues even when he was a minister in the Foreign Office earlier, that he was investigated, and found at fault — and that he accepted his misdemeanors and apologized for them.

Reacting to Johnson’s claim that he did not know of any specific allegation against Pincher, McDonald revealed they had briefed the British PM about it. Johnson’s cover-up offered late Tuesday that they had indeed briefed him, but that he then forgot such charges had been proven against a minister in the Foreign Office.

But more serious excuses have arisen behind Rishi Sunak’s resignation over ways the government should handle the economic mess it is in. Sunak wrote in his resignation letter that his views on how the economy should be handled were “fundamentally too different” from those of the PM.

He opposed Johnson’s populist tax cuts as they could damage the economic recovery. He also resisted public sector pay hikes to help manage the inflation because it would lead to yet higher inflation.

His resignation on Wednesday triggered an avalanche of resignations against PM Johnson. If Sunak succeeds Johnson, he will be the first Indian-origin man to become a British PM.

The rising star of the Tories, ever since he became the Chancellor, they have viewed Sunak as future PM material. His opponents tried to malign his image raising the issues related to the shares his wife Akshata Murthy held in her father’s company Infosys, his US green card, and the perception that he was too slow to react to Britain’s cost-of-living crisis.

But he weathered these mini-storms.

Nicknamed “Dishy”, the bookmakers Ladbrokes saw Rishi Sunak as a joint favorite alongside former Defence Secretary Penny Mordaunt to succeed Johnson, the media reported on Thursday.

He became hugely popular during the pandemic when he created a massive package worth tens of billions of pounds to help businesses and workers. But they also fined him for defying the Covid lockdown and taking part in a Downing Street gathering.

Rishi Sunak’s grandparents came to Britain from Punjab.

He met Akshata while they were students in California. They married in 2009.

He has two daughters with her.