From Eton scholar to chancellor who sent economy spiralling - Kwarteng's rise and fall

Kwasi Kwarteng’s stint as chancellor was perhaps as short as his rise to the top of politics was swift.

Mr Kwarteng was promoted to chancellor by Liz Truss on 6 September from his previous post as business secretary under Boris Johnson.

Within 38 days he had been sacked, his downfall set in motion by the economic turmoil unleashed by his mini-budget.

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He insisted his tax-cutting mini-budget was the best way to encourage growth, saying the turmoil in the UK economy was part of global pressures caused by the Ukraine war and the pandemic recovery.

But after open revolt among Tory MPs and a surge in the polls for Labour forced U-turns on two of his major policies, the prime minister decided it was time for him to go.

Mr Kwarteng is not used to failure, rising up the political ranks fairly quickly after becoming an MP in 2010 – although that did take a few attempts.

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He is also no stranger to causing controversy and sticking to his guns.

There are multiple reports of him clashing with the Treasury – he vocally backed Owen Paterson during the lobbying scandal that engulfed the former MP, and he has come in for criticism for defending visiting foreign autocratic regimes, saying it was better than “shouting from the sidelines”.

Although he won his seat on a David Cameron/George Osborne ticket, he upset his bosses by advocating cutting the VAT rate to 15% by adding the charge to children’s clothes and food, and also criticised the chancellor’s Help to Buy housing scheme as inflationary.

But his close friendship with Ms Truss – with the pair even becoming neighbours on the same street in Greenwich – secured him a spot not only in the Treasury, but in history as the first black chancellor of the UK.

Eton to the City

Mr Kwarteng was born in 1975 in Waltham Forest, east London to Alfred and Charlotte, who had emigrated from Ghana to the UK as students in the 1960s and became an economist and barrister respectively.

An only child, he attended a state primary school before his parents sent him to a private school.

He then won a scholarship to Eton College before heading to Trinity College, Cambridge where he achieved a first-class degree in classics and history – and was also a member of its winning University Challenge team.

After Cambridge, he won another scholarship to Harvard University then returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD in economic history.

His first career was as a journalist, writing columns for the Daily Telegraph, before he headed to the City where he worked as a financial analyst for big companies such as JP Morgan.

He ran for the seat of Brent East in the 2005 general election but came in third.

Mr Kwarteng then moved to chair one of the oldest think tanks in the UK, the Bow Group and in 2008 made the Conservative list of candidates for the London Assembly in 2008, but didn’t manage to secure a place.

In 2010, he secured a comfortable 22,000 majority in Spelthorne, Surrey, and had been on the rise since.

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