Kwarteng IEA fringe event hints at how deeply thinktank is embedded in No 10
Kwasi Kwarteng’s longest public appearance at the Conservative party conference will not be on the main stage, where he spoke for 20 minutes on Monday, but at a fringe event hosted by two thinktanks on Tuesday afternoon.
For an hour, the “person responsible for the UK’s economic future”, as the event bills it, will outline his vision in a conversation with the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). It will be longer than his 25-minute “mini-budget” speech and his “quarter of an hour – or maybe a bit longer” with party donors after the mini-budget.
Mark Littlewood, the director general of the IEA, will be one of Kwarteng’s interviewers, speaking to the man responsible for implementing “Trussonomics”. The IEA has faced criticism over a lack of transparency over its donors, and a 2019 Guardian investigation found it had historically issued publications arguing climate change is either not significantly driven by human activity or will be positive.
Littlewood has known Truss for more than 25 years since they met at Oxford, members of the Oxford Reform Club, a “non-partisan group but probably a bit Lib Dem-y, a bit remainy”, as Littlewood described it in a video for the IEA.
Contemporaries at the Reform Club included Olly Robbins, later Theresa May’s Europe adviser. Andy Mayer, the chief operating officer at the IEA, was “but a humble grunt” when he met Truss for the first time in the mid-90s, who was then vice-president of the club.
“It was a lot of bright people who wanted to be modernisers before modernisation was a thing under Blair. Principally one nation Conservatives, New Labourites, Liberal Democrats,” Mayer said. “Many of the people involved in it cheered the result of the 1997 election,” he
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