Rishi Sunak is a money man. At school he loved economics. At Oxford he shunned student politics, preferring the university Investment Society. He spent his twenties in the City, with the likes of Goldman Sachs.
Becoming an MP in 2015, days before his 35th birthday, he used one of his first speeches to issue a plea to be careful with the cash.
Now just five years later he is the chancellor of the exchequer breaking all of those rules, spending unprecedented amounts of money to rescue the economy from the devastating effects of the coronavirus outbreak.
But who is the man whose briefest of spells at the Treasury has already lead to him being tipped as a future prime minister?
His grandparents were born in Punjab and came to England in the sixties. Sunak was born in Southampton to an NHS GP father and pharmacist mother.
As a child he helped keep her books. In 2009 he married Akshata Murty, the daughter of billionaire tech giant NR Narayana Murty.
He describes himself as British Indian, and when he replaced William Hague as MP for Richmond in Yorkshire he swore his oath on the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Sanskrit scripture that is part of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
Once in the Commons he quickly impressed. A junior minister under David Cameron, he went on to back Leave in the 2016 referendum.
In the Tory leadership contest which followed he supported Michael Gove, when Theresa May quit he took a different approach.
Together with Robert Jenrick and Oliver Dowden, two of his closest friends in politics having become MPs around the same time, they wrote an article for The Times Red Box backing Boris Johnson as the only candidate who could see off the party’s opponents.
Long described as Boris Johnson’s favourite minister, aides in Downing Street complain that they “can’t clone Rishi yet”.
The father-of-two stood in for the prime minister during TV election debates, proving himself more capable of sticking to key messages than his boss.
He replaced Sajid Javid as chancellor in February 2020, at the age of 39, the second youngest occupant of the treasury after George Osborne for more than 100 years. Osborne has tipped him as a future PM.
His first budget, delivered after less than a month in the job, was supposed to herald the great “leveling up” project promised by the Tories, investing in roads, skills and towns neglected for years, but was overshadowed by the havoc wreaked by Covid-19.
Each new round of economic measures he has calmly announced during the crisis has brought inevitable expensive calls for more.
But it also fuels speculation that he might one day make the move from No11 to No10.
Politics, in fact all of life, is too unpredictable to be sure what the future holds.
But you wouldn’t bet against the money man.
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