Quiz of The Week: 22 - 28 October

At 42, Sunak is the youngest PM in modern British history

(Image credit: Stefan Rousseau/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

published 28 October 2022

Rishi Sunak made history this week as he became the UK’s first British Asian prime minister.

In a leadership contest that followed Liz Truss’s resignation last week, the former chancellor was overwhelmingly backed by Conservative MPs to become the UK’s third Conservative prime minister this year, after Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt both dropped out of the leadership race.

Sunak’s rise through the political ranks has been unusually rapid – he was elected to his constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire. in 2015, and as recently as 2019 was still only a junior minister in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

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But a brief stint as chief secretary to the Treasury meant that Sunak was in the perfect position to take over when Sajid Javid quit as chancellor in February 2020.

During his time in No. 11 he became well known to the public as he took the UK through the economic turmoil of the Covid-19 pandemic, spearheading the furlough scheme and controversial campaigns such as Eat Out to Help Out.

Now he has entered No. 10 as the youngest prime minister in modern British political history at the age of only 42 – but faces a daunting in-tray as he attempts to both stabilise his fractured party and deal with the UK’s long list of economic challenges.

In other news, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has become the new owner of social media site Twitter after completing a $44bn deal. The takeover is likely to have huge implications for Twitter – Musk is thought to have plans to loosen the site’s rules around hate speech and misinformation.

His first move has been to fire four of the site’s top executives, reported Politico, “including CEO Parag Agrawal and legal chief Vijaya Gadde, the official who guided the company’s policies on harmful speech, and whose team banned [Donald] Trump after the January 6 Capitol riot”. Musk tweeted last night: “the bird is freed”.

To find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest developments in the news and other global events, put your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week.

Need a reminder of some of the other headlines over the past seven days?

Prince Harry’s eagerly awaited memoir, Spare, will be published within a matter of weeks, his publisher has confirmed.
Italy’s first-ever female prime minister has taken power after being sworn in as head of a coalition described as the country’s most right-wing government since that of Benito Mussolini.
Greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere hit a record high in 2021, according to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization.
Lawyers for a group of women who were forcibly removed from a flight in Doha at gunpoint are calling for Qatar to guarantee the safety of female football fans travelling to the World Cup.

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Sorcha Bradley is a writer at The Week and a regular on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast. She worked at The Week magazine for a year and a half before taking up her current role with the digital team, where she mostly covers UK current affairs and politics. Before joining The Week, Sorcha worked at slow-news start-up Tortoise Media. She has also written for Sky News, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard and Grazia magazine, among other publications. She has a master’s in newspaper journalism from City, University of London, where she specialised in political journalism.