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With just a few days to go until the results of the Conservative leadership election are revealed on Sept. 5, two things seem overwhelmingly likely: First, that Liz Truss will be the next prime minister and, second, that Kwasi Kwarteng, the current secretary of state for business, will play a leading role in her Cabinet, probably as chancellor of the exchequer, as Britain’s leading finance minister is called.
What do we know about the “Black Boris,” as he was enthusiastically dubbed by his own campaign team in his Spelthorne constituency? And is he up to the job of tackling the worst economic crisis since the late 1970s?
Kwarteng is as close to Truss as you can get in the competitive game of politics. They were born in the same year, 1975, belong to the same parliamentary intake, 2010, and live a few streets away from each other in southeast London. They are so ideologically aligned that they co-wrote a pamphlet, “Britannia Unchained,” together with two other members of their 2010 cohort, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore.
Their partnership would be a stark contrast to the poor relations between Number 10 (the prime minister’s office) and Number 11 (the chancellor’s) of the past few years. Rishi Sunak balked at Boris Johnson’s indifference to balancing the books, Sajid Javid resigned when Johnson claimed the right to nominate his advisors, and Theresa May and Philip Hammond were barely on speaking terms. If Kwarteng becomes chancellor, we will see a return to the more amicable days of David Cameron and George Osborne.
Kwarteng is a strange mixture of the conventional and the unconventional in Tory politics. He is the product of two of the great factories of Tory operatives — Eton and Cambridge — but is also the son of Ghanaian immigrants who called him by a traditional Ashanti first name (though, oddly, “Kwasi” means “born on Sunday” when Kwarteng was in fact born on a Monday).
Temperamentally, Kwarteng is a social creature who, before the demands of high office and parenthood took their toll, could often be found dining in the familiar watering holes of the Tory world such as the Beefsteak Club or the Carlton Club. His clever conversation and booming belly laugh made him a popular companion. But he’s also a natural scholar who loves burrowing away in libraries. In her “Diary of an MP’s Wife,” Sasha Swire described him as “essentially an academic; he is enthusiastic and bombastic, and barely draws breath,” which is unkind about his conversational style but right about his scholarly side.
Affability aside, Kwarteng is defined by two things. The first is his high intelligence. Kwarteng belongs to the “big brain” rather than the “broad acres” side of the Etonian equation: He was a King’s Scholar (which means that he lived with other King’s Scholars in College and was charged reduced fees) but, unlike that other well-known King’s Scholar, Boris Johnson, he took academic life seriously, winning the school’s top prize, the Newcastle, followed by a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, a double first (the top honors) in history and classics, a scholarship to Harvard, and then a return to Cambridge to take a PhD in financial history.
He’s also published two heavyweight books, “Ghosts of Empire,” on the legacy of empire in today’s world, and “War and Gold,” which, in his own words, “aspires to be a history of money in the modern age,” as well as shorter volumes.
The second notable feature is his right-wing politics. In the perpetual Tory war between the “wets” and the “dries,” over how much to compromise with the liberal agenda on public spending and crime, Kwarteng has never been mistaken for a “wet.” His worldview was shaped by Margaret Thatcher who was prime minister from the time when he turned four to when he took his GCSEs.
On arriving in parliament in 2010, he made clear that he had no sympathy for David Cameron’s airy-fairy brand of compassionate conservatism, and instead threw in his lot with a group of other young MPs, including Truss, who believed that the party needed to return to the true faith. Unlike Truss, however, he never equivocated over Brexit, voting to leave the European Union in 2016, criticizing Theresa May’s pragmatism, and voting for Johnson and his promise to “get Brexit done.”
Apart from his faith in markets, Kwarteng’s views are shaped by his admiration for fast-growing Southeast Asian states and his anxieties about the West’s addiction to debt. “Britannia Unchained” is replete with references to the work ethic and educational achievements of the Singaporeans and Chinese. “War and Gold” worries that debt-financing has gone from its original Keynesian function, as an emergency measure during recessions, to a condition of life.
I suspect all this is driven by a pessimistic belief that the West is in secular decline, addicted to spending money that it doesn’t have, while Asia is on the rise, thanks to a fierce commitment to work and education, and that it is the job of responsible Western politicians to shake their countries awake.
Is Kwarteng up to the job of top finance minister, should he become Britain’s first Black chancellor of the exchequer? The role could hardly be more demanding, given the fact that the current cost-of-living crisis is nothing compared with what is likely to come this winter, and that the war in Ukraine is settling into a prolonged stalemate.
British journalist Nick Robinson raised one possible criticism — that he’s too clever by half, in that telling British phrase. Kenneth Clarke, a former chancellor, once argued that politics is the ideal profession for people with second-rate minds, and that those with first-rate minds, such as Enoch Powell and Sir Keith Joseph, usually end up making a hash of things. This is nonsense: There have been plenty of clever politicians such as Harold Wilson or Roy Jenkins who have been good at their jobs. The problem with Powell and Joseph had more to do with temperament than intellect.
A more reasonable criticism is that Kwarteng is too ideological. He’s certainly allowed ideology to get the better of his judgement. Before the 2017 election, for example, he predicted a stonking Conservative victory, blind to the surge in support for Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn that almost brought him into Downing Street. More recently, he was an outspoken supporter of Owen Paterson, the rule-breaking MP for North Shropshire, whose downfall arguably precipitated Johnson’s own departure. But, unlike other members of his clique, he can draw on a wider variety of resources than ideology alone.
In his recent book on leadership, Henry Kissinger recommends that politicians should read more history because it provides them with a sense of perspective and nuance. Kwarteng’s history of money sets our current problems in the context of the past 500 years, while his history of the British Empire shows that it was different things in different times and places. As business secretary, Kwarteng has matured and adopted more pragmatic views. Although he’s hardly a born-again supporter of industrial policy, he recognizes that governments can play a positive role in laying the groundwork for economic activities and in coping with externalities such as setting targets for net zero emissions.
Everything will depend on what sort of leadership Liz Truss provides and what sort of Cabinet she creates. Will she recognize that new times demand new policies? Or will she simply serve up reheated Thatcherism? Will she create a Cabinet in which guiding assumptions are tested and different voices heard? Or will she follow Boris Johnson’s example of appointing a Cabinet of lightweights?
Placed in the right context, Kwarteng’s obvious qualities — his powerful intellect and his big personality — could become a valuable asset. Set in the wrong one — blinkered leadership and dim-witted colleagues — the very same traits could drive the country over the edge with remarkable speed.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author, most recently, of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”
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