The UK’s first Asian prime minister and its youngest for some 200 years, Rishi Sunak, was formally appointed by King Charles III on Tuesday. In his first public address he said that his predecessor had made mistakes and that he had been “elected as leader of the party and as prime minister in part to fix them. And that work begins immediately.”

Pledging to place “economic competence and stability at the heart of this government's agenda”, Sunak told his audience that difficult decisions on the economy would have to be made.

The new prime minister than set about shaping his cabinet, firing or demoting some 11 members of the Truss government and installing some fresh and some familiar faces from the past decade of Tory rule.

One of Sunak’s most significant moves was to continue with Jeremy Hunt as his chancellor. It was Hunt who stepped in to calm the markets following Liz Truss’s dismissal of Kasi Kwarteng after their mini-budget caused the pound to crash and the cost of borrowing to shoot up.

According to the FT, Hunt’s upcoming fiscal statement, provisionally planned for 31 October, could be moved back a couple of days. But it is said to includes plans to freeze income tax thresholds and increase taxation on the profits of energy companies and banks, the FT reckons.

But Sunak did come under fire for his decision to reinstate Suella Braverman as Home Secretary less than a week after she was forced to resign for a breach of the ministerial code. Braverman is  from the right wing of the party and once said it was her “dream…my obsession” to see a front page of the Telegraph with a plane full of refugees who had been refused status by the UK flying to Rwanda. Some commentators have even said her hardline stance on immigration may scupper a potential trade deal with India.

James Cleverly retains his post as foreign secretary and therefore the boss of ambassador to Luxembourg Fleur Thomas. That is perhaps a sign that Sunak wants to unite the party, as Cleverly had declared his backing for Liz Truss and then Boris Johnson against Sunak in the last two leadership contests. Just before his appointment was confirmed, Cleverly had made a call with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba to reiterate the UK’s support.  

Sunak himself, who has been criticised for having little or no experience of foreign policy unlike Truss or the prime minister before her, Boris Johnson, spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later in the day and also had a call with US president Joe Biden

Truss had filled her cabinet with loyalists, whereas Sunak seems to have made his appointments more pragmatically in an effort to unite the Tory party. But he did snub Penny Mordaunt, who had waited until the very last minute to withdraw from the contest on Monday, by not giving her a promotion from her post as leader of the house.

Meanwhile, much fun was had on Twitter at the expense of Johnson loyalist Jacob Rees-Mogg. The former business secretary didn’t even wait until Sunak’s cabinet announcements to deliver his resignation letter, a handwritten missive that The Guardian said was in his “characteristically anachronistic style” that he dated “St Crispin’s Day”.