Kwasi Kwarteng: the 38-day chancellor

Kwasi Kwarteng was sacked as chancellor of the Exchequer after a 38-day reign in which he delivered an emergency mini-budget that crashed both the pound and his political career.

Speculation that Kwarteng was facing the axe mounted following his early return on Thursday from Washington D.C., where he had been attending meetings of the International Monetary Fund. He went straight to 10 Downing Street, where he accepted Liz Truss’s request that he step down. But in an open letter to the prime minister, Kwarteng defended his actions as chancellor, insisting that “following the status quo was simply not an option”.

Kwarteng is the second-shortest serving UK chancellor, behind Iain Macleod, who died in 1970 after 30 days in office.

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What is his background?

Born in the London borough of Waltham Forest in 1975, Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng is the only child of economist Alfred K. Kwarteng and barrister Charlotte Boaitey-Kwarteng, who emigrated from Ghana as students in the 1960s.

After securing a scholarship to Eton, Kwarteng went on to study at Cambridge and then as a Kennedy scholar at Harvard, before returning to Cambridge to complete a PhD in economic history.

During his second stint at the UK university, he was part of the Trinity College team who won University Challenge in 1995 – and secured headlines after swearing on the BBC quiz show. After buzzing in to answer a question, he declared: “Oh fuck, I’ve forgotten.”

His unguarded comment “slipped past the BBC’s production team and was broadcast to the nation”, wrote The Guardian’s Rupert Neate, and resulted in a story in The Sun headlined “Rudiversity Challenge”.

After leaving university, Kwarteng worked as a financial analyst at JPMorgan Chase and other investment banks, and as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, before being elected as an MP in 2010.

He is also the author of a string of books on history and politics, including Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (2012) and Thatcher’s Trial: Six Months that Defined a Leader (2015).

Kwarteng married City solicitor Harriet Edwards in 2019. According to The Guardian’s home affairs editor Rajeev Syal, he had previously dated “several senior party women” after becoming a Tory MP, including former home secretary Amber Rudd.

What political roles has he held?

Kwarteng failed in bids to win the constituency of Brent East in 2005 and election to the London Assembly in 2008, but was elected to the safe Tory seat of Spelthorne in northern Surrey in 2010 – the same year that Truss became an MP.

He began his career in Westminster with a speech in which he demanded that Labour apologise for the financial crash of 2008, despite having worked “not merely in investment banking but in the mortgages division of JPMorgan”, said The Independent’s political sketch writer Tom Peck. And “you do not need to be the biggest expert on that crisis to know precisely where it started”, Peck added.

Kwarteng was appointed parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to then-chancellor Philip Hammond in 2017. According to The Times’s reporter Ben Ellery, Kwarteng was afterwards overheard telling someone: “It took Stanley Baldwin eight years to become a PPS and he then became prime minister seven years later. I’ve become a PPS in seven.”

In 2018, Kwarteng replaced Suella Braverman, now home secretary, as a minister in the Department for Exiting the EU.

A long-time backer of Johnson, he was elevated to serve in the cabinet in January 2021, as business secretary, becoming the first black Conservative secretary of state.

Yet his time as an MP has also been plagued by controversy. In the final week of the Tory leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Truss, The Mirror’s Whitehall correspondent Mikey Smith reported that Kwarteng’s Wikipedia page had been edited, “apparently from within Parliament – to remove all mention of the Owen Paterson scandal”.

The mystery editor had scrubbed “from it any mention of him being an outspoken supporter of Mr Paterson – the Tory MP who quit after breaking lobbying rules”, said Smith.

Unlike many of his cabinet colleagues, Kwarteng did not resign in protest at Johnson’s leadership in July. But Kwarteng was also a long-time friend and ideological ally to Johnson’s successor, Truss.

What did he do as chancellor?

In what the new government insisted was a “fiscal event” – a budget in all but name – Kwarteng outlined a series of measures that he argued would boost growth, including what he said were the biggest tax cuts in a generation.

The mini-budget sent markets into a spin and saw the pound tumble to an all-time low. Kwarteng was accused of recklessly gambling with the UK’s finances with what The Independent described as his “borrowing-fuelled tax cut spree”.

The Times’s called his growth plan “the biggest fiscal splurge since Anthony Barber’s 1972 budget”, which “fuelled a disastrous inflationary boom and subsequent bust”.

Every party that has been in power has to keep reinventing itself, said the Financial Times’s Henry Mance. “Everything must change for the party in government to remain the same,” he said, but Kwarteng’s economic shifts felt “like the most reckless metamorphosis yet”.

How did his reign end?

Kwarteng was removed from his post after what PoliticsHome described as “two weeks of economic chaos”. The mini-budget failed to account for around £45bn of tax cuts that critics said benefited higher earners at the expense on people already struggling to cope during the cost-of-living crisis.

City analysts had warned of a “severe market reaction” to the mini-budget, and that prediction proved to be correct. As the pound plummeted against the dollar, mortgage lenders withdrew offers, and the cost of government borrowing rose as bonds were sold off, reducing their value and threatening vital pension funds. So panicked were the markets that the Bank of England intervened, purchasing long-term government bonds.

As the axe finally fell on Kwarteng, Truss announced that he would be replaced by Jeremy Hunt, who served as health secretary for six years under David Cameron and Theresa May.