LONDON - Mr Rishi Sunak would have every right to be smug.

Throughout the summer, Britain’s former finance minister – who is now slated to be the next prime minister – warned against the economic policies of Ms Liz Truss as he competed with her for the nation’s top job, and then lost.

From the first television debate, when he described her plans as a “fairy tale”, to the final days of the contest when he said he “struggled to see” how Ms Truss’ tax cuts and spending plans would “add up”, he sounded the alarm.

For the past six weeks, Mr Sunak has been lying low as his economic predictions have played out at dizzying speed. Investors baulked at Ms Truss’ widespread tax cuts and increased borrowing, the pound slumped, government borrowing costs soared, the mortgage market was upended, and the central bank had to intervene.

After just 45 days as premier, Ms Truss resigned last week with her economic agenda in tatters.

Mr Sunak’s relatively gloomy attitude over the summer, warnings about inflation, and strict adherence to fiscal conservatism may have cost him the opportunity to be named prime minister in September. But less than two months later, these same characteristics and accurate prognosis of the effects of Ms Truss’ programme have eased his pathway to Britain’s top job.

After former prime minister Boris Johnson took himself out of the running on Sunday, Mr Sunak has completed his comeback. Mr Sunak will become the next premier after Ms Penny Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons, failed to get enough support from Tory MPs.

“He clearly comes with the huge advantage” of being able to say everyone was warned, said Ms Jill Rutter, a former civil servant and a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, a London-based research group.

“Clearly, a lot of people are now thinking, he was right and Truss was wrong, and they’ve proved that in spades. The UK has paid a high price for that, and will continue to pay a high price for that lost credibility.”

Mr Sunak, 42, had on Sunday formally declared he was running to be the leader of the Conservative Party and, by extension, the next prime minister.

“The United Kingdom is a great country, but we face a profound economic crisis,” Mr Sunak said in a statement on Sunday. He added that he wanted to “fix our economy” and that he had a track record of delivery.

In a tweet, he praised Mr Johnson for Brexit and the coronavirus vaccine roll-out.

“I truly hope he continues to contribute to public life, at home and abroad,” Mr Sunak said.

Mr Sunak’s rise in politics has been uncommonly rapid. In early 2020, at just 39 years old, he was catapulted into the position of chancellor of the exchequer in the Treasury department by Mr Johnson. Mr Sunak has held a seat in Parliament only since 2015.

He became the nation’s most popular politician after spending hundreds of billions of pounds on emergency pandemic measures, including paying people’s wages and arranging generous grant and loan programmes for businesses.

For a long time, he was considered Mr Johnson’s heir apparent. But then his political star suddenly started to fall earlier in 2022.

His efforts to shrink the vast pandemic-era public spending were met with a drop in popularity and policy U-turns. In March, as inflation started to bite in Britain and fears grew over a cost-of-living crisis, Mr Sunak announced only limited support to help vulnerable households. Two months later, he came up with a more generous plan that offered every household hundreds of pounds in discounts off energy bills.

The criticism of Mr Sunak has been intensified by his wealth. Photographs of him wearing designer clothes and using “smart” coffee mugs that cost hundreds of dollars and revelations that he owned a Peloton exercise bike have created an image of someone who is out of touch with a population squeezed by the highest inflation rate in four decades.

While his Indian heritage shows the Conservative Party’s progress in diversifying its ranks, and would make him Britain’s first prime minister who is not white, Mr Sunak has many of the traditional trappings of a Tory upbringing.

He went to the fee-paying Winchester School and studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. He worked at investment bank Goldman Sachs and two hedge funds before becoming an MP.

While studying for a Master of Business Administration at Stanford University, he met his wife Akshata Murthy, a fashion designer whose father Narayana Murthy co-founded technology giant Infosys and is one of India’s richest men. They have homes in London, in Mr Sunak’s parliamentary constituency in Yorkshire, and in Santa Monica, California, and were featured in 2022 in The Sunday Times’ annual ranking of Britain’s wealthiest people.

Mr Sunak’s wealth is likely to remain a political vulnerability for him, said Ms Rutter. Wealth is “always going to be the difficulty for Sunak”, she said, “if he comes in and says we all have to make sacrifices”.

When he becomes prime minister, it is likely that Mr Sunak will preside over spending cuts to government departments with already stretched budgets.

Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt has warned of difficult spending decisions as he has tried to repair the damage to Britain’s fiscal credibility caused by Ms Truss’ tax plan.

Although Mr Sunak, as prime minister, would not be obligated to keep Mr Hunt in that role, it would be risky for any new leader to deviate sharply from the fiscal plans that have brought some calm to Britain’s financial markets.

Mr Sunak may have steered the British economy through more than two years of crisis, but Britain’s next prime minister faces enormous economic challenges.

The nation is likely to enter a recession, and longstanding issues include low productivity growth and trade and labour market disruptions created by Brexit.

Mr Sunak also has political problems. His resignation was the tipping point in Mr Johnson’s downfall in July, which means there are many in the party in Parliament and in the broader membership who will struggle to get behind him.

Mr Sunak will be caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side is an unruly and fractious Conservative Party, and on the other side, financial markets that expect strict discipline on public finances.

“It will take an immensely skilful politician to navigate their way through this,” Ms Rutter said. “The really interesting question is, is Rishi Sunak skilful enough?”

NYTIMES