Kwasi Kwarteng: free marketeer and Truss’s ideological soulmate becomes chancellor
During his stint as business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng clashed with Rishi Sunak over how best to oversee the UK economy. This week, he walks into the office of chancellor once held by his former rival, taking charge at the Treasury under his longstanding political and ideological ally Liz Truss as the most powerful black man in British politics.
As a loyal supporter of Truss – the pair entered parliament together in 2010 – Kwarteng is likely to have a much smoother relationship with his Downing Street colleague than Boris Johnson endured with Sunak. The two are already neighbours after Kwarteng moved to the same Greenwich street as Truss earlier this year.
His elevation, however, comes in the midst of a historic economic storm with the worst outlook outside the Covid pandemic in decades. The country is teetering on the brink of a lengthy recession with inflation at the highest rate in 40 years and the NHS braced for a winter crisis.
An ideological soulmate of Truss from the free-market right, the Surrey MP is a relative latecomer to ministerial jobs – his first junior role came in late 2018 – but rose rapidly under Johnson to become a key member of his government.
He was born in east London to parents who migrated from Ghana as students in the 1960s, and was educated at Eton then Cambridge, where he completed a PhD on a 17th-century crisis with English silver currency. A Kennedy scholarship at Harvard followed, before work in finance at JP Morgan and Odey Asset Management, run by the Brexit-backing investor Crispin Odey.
Tall and imposing at 6ft 4in, with a loud belly laugh that can be heard from other floors in his Whitehall office, he won the Newcastle scholarship while at Eton – the school’s most prestigious prize for
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