In 2014 the ambitious book was published War and gold: a five-hundred-year history of empires, adventures and debt review. In a detailed and entertaining way, it described how risky handling of money – from speculation to imperial adventures – has had devastating effects on societies over the centuries. The author was a young, erudite historian who sat for the Conservatives in the House of Commons and was seen as the rising star of the right wing: Kwasi Kwarteng.
Eight years later, Kwarteng, who recently took office as finance minister, has caused his own crisis with a budget that has been dismissed as speculative, reckless and unfair. Financial markets went haywire, the Conservative Party plummeted in the polls and Kwasi Kwarteng earned the nickname ‘Kamikwasi’. On Monday, under pressure from his own party, the minister had to scrap a crucial part, tax cuts for the rich. It was too distracting, he claimed. It wasn’t a mistake.
His position is shaky, as is that of his boss and soul mate Liz Truss with whom he had drawn up the offending budget in the Richard I pub in Greenwich. The Sunday Times reported that after its presentation, Kwarteng drank champagne with a group of hedge fund bosses during a drink in Chelsea. These traders, including some Conservative Party backers, would benefit greatly from the temporary pound drop caused by the budget. They encouraged the minister to ignore criticism.
middle class
These are the kind of circles that Kwarteng, who worked under renowned hedge fund boss Crispin Odey before entering politics in 2005, has been in all his life. North London born Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng comes from the middle class. His mother was a lawyer and his father worked as an economist on the Commonwealth’s executive board. The two had come to England as students from Ghana. Like many other immigrant families, the Kwartengs attached great importance to good education. At eight, Kwasi, an only child, was sent to a boarding school, while his parents moved to Switzerland, where Father Alfred was temporarily stationed.
At that school he won the Harrow History Prize. It was the first addition to his academic trophy cabinet, which would later be filled with tokens of appreciation from Eton and Cambridge. He also won the quiz University Challenge with Trinity College, embarrassing the BBC with the comment ‘Oh, fuck, I have forgotten’ after a question about donkeys. Like Boris Johnson, the physically strong Quarteng also excelled during the Wall Game at Eton, a sport that is halfway between football, rugby and free wrestling.
Kwarteng developed into a bookworm who wrote his poems in Latin and Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the 21st century in French. Like a typical Young Fogey, an early gentleman, he used to dress in tweed and smoke a pipe at dinners with learned friends. His PhD research at Cambridge focused on the English currency crisis of 1696, which was the result of a poorly executed plan by King William III of Orange to replace silver coins in order to combat counterfeiting.
British Imperialism
Kwarteng received praise for his book Ghosts of Empire, in which he looked at the experiences and consequences of British imperialism. In this study, Kwarteng wanted to look beyond the ‘cartoonish’ right or wrong debate. Also belongs Thatcher’s Trial: six months that defined a leader (2015) to his oeuvre, a book in which he looks back on the six months in 1981 in which the Conservative Prime Minister took a radical, neoliberal course. She turned the country to her will, despite political opposition and warnings from economists.
These books are the setting for his own political career, which got off to a good start after the Brexit referendum. After a short stint at Finance, Kwarteng became boss of the Brexit affairs department. The minister was discredited when he accused judges of partiality; this after the Supreme Court ruled Boris Johnson’s dissolution of the House of Commons as unlawful. After becoming Secretary of Commerce under Johnson, Truss gave him his dream post in the Treasury.
For this intellectual it was an opportunity to put into practice the ideas and knowledge he had acquired over the years. In his radical budget, Kwarteng, who has little direct knowledge of the dire financial circumstances facing millions of his compatriots, spoke triumphantly of a ‘Great Day for Freedom’. He haughtily dismissed the chaos in the financial markets as ‘City boys playing a reckless game’, before the academic of yesteryear had to deal with the harsh political reality.
When Kwarteng first got a government post, he wrote the letters MSH on a board as a mission statement, short for Make Shit Happen. He certainly succeeded.
3 x Quarter Egg
Kwarteng was bad for David Cameron and his Secretary of the Treasury George Osborne. The young politician had clearly shown that he had little faith in the intellectual abilities of the two leaders.
Kwarteng is known as a charmer and has had multiple relationships with women within the party, including former Home Secretary Amber Rudd. He now lives with a City lawyer.
Nota bene on the first day of Black History Month, last Saturday, the left-wing tabloid published The Daily Mirror an article on Kwarteng, where the newspaper featured a photo of another black man.