Kwasi Kwarteng

Official portrait, 2021

Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth

Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union

Chancellor of the Exchequer

**Kwasi Kwarteng** (born **Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng**; 26 May 1975) is a British politician serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer since 2022. He previously served as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from 2021 to 2022. A member of the Conservative Party, he has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Spelthorne in northern Surrey since 2010.

In November 2018, Kwarteng was appointed Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Exiting the European Union. Following the election of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in July 2019, Kwarteng was promoted to Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth, attending Cabinet as part of the role. In January 2021, Kwarteng was promoted to Business Secretary. After Johnson resigned in 2022, Kwarteng supported Liz Truss’s bid to become Conservative leader. Following Truss's appointment as Prime Minister, she appointed Kwarteng as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Kwarteng is the first black person to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

## Early life and education

Kwarteng was born in the London Borough of Waltham Forest in 1975, the only child of Alfred K. Kwarteng and Charlotte Boaitey-Kwarteng, who had emigrated from Ghana as students in the 1960s. His mother is a barrister and his father an economist in the Commonwealth Secretariat.

After starting school at a state primary school, Kwarteng attended Colet Court, an independent preparatory school in London, where he won the Harrow History Prize in 1988. Kwarteng then went to Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar and was awarded the prestigious Newcastle Scholarship prize. He read classics and history at Trinity College, Cambridge, achieving a first in both subjects and twice winning the Browne Medal. He was a member of the team which won *University Challenge* in 1995 (in the first series after the programme was revived by the BBC in 1994). Whilst at Cambridge, he was a member of the University Pitt Club, and has since returned to visit. He attended Harvard University on a Kennedy Scholarship, and then earned a PhD in economic history from the University of Cambridge in 2000.

## Early career

Before becoming a member of parliament, Kwarteng worked as a columnist for *The Daily Telegraph* and as a financial analyst at JPMorgan Chase and other investment banks. He wrote a book, *Ghosts of Empire*, about the legacy of the British Empire, published by Bloomsbury in 2011. He also co-authored *Gridlock Nation* with Jonathan Dupont in 2011, about the causes of and solutions to traffic congestion in Britain.

### Early political career

Considered "a rising star on the right of the party", Kwarteng was the Conservative candidate in the constituency of Brent East at the 2005 general election. He finished in third place. Kwarteng was chairman of the Bow Group in 2005–06. In 2006, *The Times* suggested that he could become the first black Conservative cabinet minister. He was sixth on the Conservative list of candidates for the London Assembly in the 2008 London Assembly election, but was not elected, as the Conservatives claimed only three London-wide list seats.

## Parliamentary career

### 2010 election and tenure

Kwarteng was selected as the Conservative candidate for Spelthorne at an open primary in January 2010 after the incumbent Conservative MP, David Wilshire, became mired in controversy arising from the Parliamentary expenses scandal and announced that he would be retiring from Parliament at the next general election.

Kwarteng won the seat with 22,261 votes (numerically more votes but a lower percentage of the vote than his predecessor). Kwarteng did not vote on the backbench EU Referendum Bill in October 2011. Kwarteng irritated Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in 2013 by criticising the Help to Buy housing scheme as inflationary.

In 2014, his book *War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt* was published. It is a history of capital and the enduring ability of money, when combined with speculation, to ruin societies. The book has been translated into Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. In 2015 his next book, *Thatcher's Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader*, was published.

Kwarteng was re-elected at the 2015 general election with an increased majority. Kwarteng backed the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union in the 2016 referendum.

### Early ministerial career (2017–2019)

Following the 2017 general election, Kwarteng was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond. On 16 November 2018, Kwarteng replaced Suella Braverman as a minister in the Department for Exiting the EU.

Kwarteng was a vocal supporter of Boris Johnson in the 2016 and 2019 Conservative Party leadership elections. After Johnson's victory in the latter election, on 25 July 2019 Kwarteng was appointed Minister of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy along with Jo Johnson, brother of the Prime Minister. He was appointed to the Privy Council on the same day.

In September 2019, Kwarteng was criticised by former Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell for stating on *The Andrew Neil Show*: "I'm not saying this, but, many people are saying that the judges are biased" after the Court of Session ruled that Boris Johnson's prorogation of parliament was illegal. Kwarteng added: "The extent to which lawyers and judges are interfering in politics is something that concerns many people."

### Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2021–2022)

On 8 January 2021, as part of a mini-reshuffle, he replaced Alok Sharma as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. He became the first black man to run a government department, by being appointed to the level of Secretary of State. He has committed his department to cutting global emissions to stop climate change. In May 2021, Kwarteng opened a new electric car battery plant in Oxfordshire.

#### Dissolving ISC

In March 2021, he was criticised for dissolving the Industrial Strategy Council, the advisory body seeking to regenerate Britain's regions. In the days after the COP26 climate summit, Kwarteng met oil industry bosses to encourage them to continue drilling in the North Sea.

In January 2022, while on a trip to Saudi Arabia, Kwarteng accepted flights and hospitality from Saudi Aramco, the majority state-owned energy firm. Kwarteng was also gifted a £300 Lenovo tablet. The BEIS department transparency data revealed that Kwarteng travelled to Saudi Arabia on a commercial flight costing the taxpayer £4430. He also visited Aramco's Shaybah oil field with the Saudi energy minister, although this was not logged in BEIS transparency records. Many politicians criticised Kwarteng taking the Saudi state's hospitality, particularly in light of their human rights record, while others have raised concern whether he has broken the ministerial code.

#### 2021 gas crisis

From August 2021, high European wholesale natural gas prices caused some smaller domestic suppliers in the United Kingdom to go out of business. In September 2021, the fuel supply crisis caused serious disruption to the supply of road fuel. Kwarteng said that "There is no question of the lights going out, of people being unable to heat their homes. There will be no three-day working week, or a throwback to the 1970s." He also said: "The government will not be bailing out failed companies. There will be no rewards for failure or mismanagement." Ed Miliband, Labour's shadow business secretary, accused Kwarteng of being "complacent about the situation we are facing" as though it "was normal for a number of suppliers to go down each winter. But what we are dealing with is far from normal – 800,000 customers losing their suppliers yesterday alone, 1.5 million in the last six weeks."

#### Role in the Owen Paterson scandal

Kwarteng was an outspoken supporter of Owen Paterson, who had been found by the Commons Select Committee on Standards to have committed "an egregious case of paid advocacy". In reaction to this ruling, Kwarteng called for the independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Stone, to "decide her position". The government later U-turned its support for Paterson, who resigned as an MP. The opposition called for an investigation into Kwarteng, claiming he may have breached the ministerial code.

On 15 November 2021, Kwarteng published a letter of apology to Stone, in which he said he "did not mean to express doubt about your ability to discharge your role" and apologised for "any upset or distress my choice of words may have caused".

### Chancellor of the Exchequer

Kwarteng was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by incoming Prime Minister Liz Truss on 6 September 2022. On 23 September 2022, he announced a set of economic policies named "The Growth Plan 2022" in what the Treasury described as a "fiscal event"; this was dubbed a "mini-budget" by the media. He refused to allow the Office for Budget Responsibility to assess the economic impact of the budget and provide a forecast.

Among the policies announced by Kwarteng was a cut in the basic rate of income tax from 20% to 19% to start in April 2023, the abolition of the 45% higher rate of income tax in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the lifting of the stamp duty threshold, the freezing of energy bills, the reversal of the increase in National Insurance from April 2022, the abolition of the proposed Health and Social Care Levy, and the scrapping of the limit on bankers' bonuses. The Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson called it "the biggest package of tax cuts in 50 years" and said that "the plan seems to be to borrow large sums at increasingly expensive rates, put government debt on an unsustainable rising path, and hope that we get better growth". The following week, sterling fell to its lowest-ever level against the US dollar, and turmoil in government bond prices led the Bank of England to launch an emergency bond buying programme. This caused house mortgage lenders to suspend most of their products to reprice them upwards, which had severe political consequences for MPs. The International Monetary Fund cautioned that the measures would increase inequality.

Following criticism from several Conservative MPs, including Michael Gove, Kwarteng said on 3 October 2022 that the government would not pursue the plan to abolish the 45% higher rate of income tax paid by people earning over £150,000 a year. Kwarteng said the plan had become a "distraction from our overriding mission to tackle the challenges facing the country". Following the Conservative Party conference in October 2022, Kwarteng had an approval rating of -51%, according to an opinion poll by *The Observer*.

Kwarteng was dismissed on 14 October after 38 days, making him the second-shortest serving post-war Chancellor after Iain Macleod, who died in office. He was succeeded by Jeremy Hunt.

## Political views

Kwarteng is considered a member of the right-wing of the Conservative Party.

### Racial issues and colonialism

Kwarteng's views on colonialism have been described by a PoliticsHome writer as "nuanced". Kwarteng has argued that many supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement and critics of British imperialism have "a very kind of cartoon-like view" of the past, arguing:

> *"So within that time and geography there's a huge amount of variety, different cultures and different time periods and getting a sensitivity to that is hugely important and I think a lot of the debate around Black Lives Matter and imperialism or colonialism has a very kind of cartoon-like view of what was happening over centuries across a quarter of the world."*
>
>

### Economic issues

In August 2012, Kwarteng co-authored a book with four fellow MPs titled *Britannia Unchained*. The book argues for a radical shrinking of the welfare state in order "to return it to the contributory principle envisioned by its founder Sir William Beveridge – that you get benefits in return for contributions".

## Personal life

Kwarteng is described by friends as an "intensely private" person. He was previously in a relationship with former Conservative Home Secretary Amber Rudd. He married City solicitor Harriet Edwards in December 2019. Their daughter was born on 15 October 2021. He has lived in Bayswater, and in January 2022 purchased a house in Greenwich.