King Charles III greets UK’s first British-Asian PM Rishi Sunak

King Charles III on Tuesday, October 25, officially appointed UK’s first Prime Minister of Asian origin, Rishi Sunak, who won the Conservative Party leadership race to become the front-runner for the job after Liz Truss resigned.

The BBC confirmed Sunak’s appointment after he met with the monarch in 1844 Room in Buckingham Palace, making him UK’s 57th prime minister and the third this year alone; he is also the youngest UK PM in two centuries at 42.

The outlet described the meeting, between Sunak and King Charles as a ‘symbolic handover of power, in a mix of ceremony and political pragmatism… against a backdrop of huge political turmoil’.

King Charles’ first official meeting with the new PM is a long-held tradition and a key constitutional role of the monarch in Britain; the late Queen Elizabeth carried out this duty until her last days, meeting and appointing Liz Truss as PM just two days before her death on September 8, 2022.

The moment was not just historic for Sunak as the first British-Asian PM of the UK, but also marked King Charles’ first official PM appointment since assuming the throne after his mother’s death last month.