Kwasi Kwarteng: The chancellor with a tough task ahead

The former business secretary’s delicate political manoeuvring has served him well, including backing Liz Truss. But, asks Tom Peck, is ideological fantasy about to hit reality?

In some ways, Kwarteng’s greatest strength is to think himself so vastly superior to all around him, that it is in effect impossible for him to be made to look a fool (PA)

Kwasi Kwarteng is a shining example of how politics is not quite as easy as people tend to think.

Kwarteng, 47, is blessed with sufficient intellect to win a scholarship to Eton, to complete a PhD at Cambridge on the “Political Thought of the Recoinage Crisis of 1695 to 1697”, to win a further scholarship to Harvard, various medals for Latin and Greek poetry and also to win University Challenge.

Yet he does not appear capable of not making himself appear ridiculous almost every time he goes on television. As one of the most impossibly highly self-regarding men in all of Westminster, one suspects Kwarteng does not consider Sky News’s Kay Burley (to take one random example) to be his intellectual superior. But he has, on very many occasions, failed to provide any supporting evidence for such a belief, should he happen to hold it.

It’s not altogether his fault. Kwarteng’s recent ascent has been into a firmament rendered dim by its now collapsed North Star, Boris Johnson. It is almost impossible to count up the number of times Kwarteng has been made to look ridiculous, but then it is almost impossible to count the number of other Cabinet ministers to whom the same has happened.

The most notable occasion came in November of last year, when Johnson placed his MPs under a three-line whip, in order to force them to vote to, in effect, save Owen Paterson but disgrace themselves in the process. Kwarteng wandered on to the news channels to launch the best defence he could manage of the most appalling breach of standards in years. And no sooner had he finished making himself look stupid than Johnson decided against it, making him look doubly stupid.

He didn’t seem to mind. In some ways, Kwarteng’s greatest strength is to think himself so vastly superior to all around him, that it is in effect impossible for him to be made to look a fool. In Kwarteng’s world, if Kwarteng looks ridiculous, there must be something wrong with the world, not him. This was also not sufficient, a few months later, for him to join the braver of his Cabinet colleagues and resign from his post as business secretary, thus forcing Johnson to resign. Instead, he quietly let it be known that he had been advising the prime minister to consider his position.

Still, politics has never not been the home for the morally strategic, and such knowingly delicate manoeuvring has evidently served Kwarteng well. He hitched his wagons to the Liz Truss train many months ago and it has just now dropped him off at the door of No 11 Downing Street.

The two have been fellow travellers for a while. Both were among the authors of the now notorious Britannia Unchained book, a kind of libertarian pamphlet of hare-brained ideas. There is not much in the book with which Boris Johnson would ever have disagreed in his Telegraph columnist days, but there is also not much in the book which he didn’t almost immediately abandon when faced with the actual, real-life difficulties of high office. The Truss/Kwarteng axis will also almost certainly find themselves engaged in the struggle between ideological fantasy and real life. The trouble is, in their case, fantasy is far more likely to win and so everybody else must lose.

His career in Westminster began with a maiden speech in 2010, in which he demanded Labour apologise for the financial crash of 2008. A noble sentiment, perhaps, though insofar as any UK government could have limited the impact of that global crisis, it could only have been done by less light-touch regulation, something which the Conservatives would not have dreamt of imposing at the time, and certainly not Kwarteng. Not long before being elected an MP in 2010, he was working not merely in investment banking but in the mortgages division of JPMorgan. You do not need to be the biggest expert on that crisis to know precisely where it started.

Kwarteng backed Leave in the EU referendum, though, on a personal note, I cannot recall any role whatsoever that he may have had in the campaign. From his position as chancellor, he will certainly have plenty of opportunities to apologise for the economic damage of Brexit. You would be brave to hold your breath while waiting for him to do so.

Now that he has been given the role, from his first day in the job and quite possibly to the last, there will be only one issue that dominates, and that will be soaring inflation caused by the energy crisis. How Truss and Sunak plan to keep the lights on is a subject on which we all remain in the dark. Their instincts are well understood, and that is to cut taxes, but there is no tax cut big enough to cover the losses people are soon to face on their energy bills.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Kwarteng is very much into renewable energy, and has been determined for some time to end the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels. Yet we also know that, within days of becoming the second most powerful person in the country, he will almost certainly have to watch the most powerful person, Truss, end the ban on fracking.

That’s the sort of thing that should infuriate a noble politician trying to do the right thing. It will be interesting to see how quiet Kwarteng remains on the subject. Strategic morality is a powerful thing, and there can be no doubting his hope that it might yet take him one small step further up the ladder, when the time is right.