what was kwasi kwarteng's phd in

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The Rt Hon Kwasi Kwarteng MP

Kwasi Kwarteng was previously appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer from 6 September 2022 to 14 October 2022.

He was Secretary of State at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy between 8 January 2021 and 6 September 2022.

He was previously Minister of State at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Kwasi was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Exiting the European Union from 16 November 2018 to 24 July 2019.

Kwasi read classics and history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then attended Harvard University on a Kennedy Scholarship. He earned a PhD in economic history from the University of Cambridge in 2000.

Before becoming a Member of Parliament, Kwasi worked as an analyst in financial services.

Kwasi was elected the Conservative MP for Spelthorne in 2010. From 2010 until 2013 he was a member of the Transport Select Committee, and in 2013 he joined the Work and Pensions Select Committee where he was a member until 2015.

In October 2016 Kwasi joined the Public Accounts Committee, where he was a member until May 2017.

In 2015 Kwasi was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Leader of the House of Lords, and in 2017 he became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Personal life

Kwasi’s passions include history, music and languages. He has lived in and around London for most of his life. He has authored several books, including Ghosts of Empire, War and Gold and Thatcher’s Trial.

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About Kwasi

Kwasi was born and raised in London. He studied Classics and History at Cambridge University, and then attended Harvard University on a Kennedy Scholarship. He completed a PhD in Economic History at Cambridge in 2000. Before becoming a Member of Parliament, Kwasi worked as a financial analyst in the City, and as an author.

 Kwasi was elected as the MP for Spelthorne on 6 May 2010 and was re-elected in 2015, 2017 and 2019. Since being elected, Kwasi has served on the Transport Select Committee, the Work and Pensions Select Committee and as a member of the Public Accounts Committee.

Kwasi has also served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Leader of the House of Lords and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 2018 Kwasi was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Exiting the European Union, and in 2019 he was appointed as Minister of State in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

In January 2021 Kwasi was appointed as Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

In Spelthorne, Kwasi has consistently supported local enterprise, and in 2013 he launched the Spelthorne Business Plan Competition to find and support the local entrepreneurs of tomorrow. The competition has successfully taken place every year since, except in 2020 due to pandemic.

Kwasi has written several books, and continues to have a keen interest in history, as well as in music and languages.

Who is Kwasi Kwarteng and why is he quitting British politics?

The Conservative MP is best known for the financial chaos he unleashed during 38 days as chancellor of the exchequer.

This week, controversial UK Conservative Member of Parliament Kwasi Kwarteng announced his decision to step down from politics and will not be standing at the next general election which has to take place by January 28, 2025, but could be held this year.

Kwarteng, 48, has served as the member of Parliament for Spelthorne, Surrey, since 2010 and has also held senior cabinet positions in government. He is likely to be best remembered for the financial chaos he unleashed during his 38 days as chancellor of the exchequer in 2022.

“Yesterday I informed my Association Chair of my decision …” he wrote on X. “It has been an honour to serve the residents of Spelthorne since 2010, and I shall continue to do so for the remainder of my time in Parliament.”

His post sparked a mixture of taunts and criticism from commentators and left-wing legislators, among them satirical congratulations for having managed to “wreck the economy” of a country in less than three weeks.

Who is Kwasi Kwarteng?

Kwarteng’s election to Parliament as a Conservative member for Spelthorne in the 2010 UK general election coincided with his party’s return to power after 13 years of Labour rule.

As then-Conservative Party leader David Cameron became prime minister in a Conservative-led coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, the London-born Kwarteng was just about to turn 35 and his future looked bright.

But other than having been born to highly accomplished immigrant parents from Ghana – his father was an economist and his mother a barrister – Kwarteng arrived in the House of Commons at Westminster with a CV typical of many Conservative politicians.

Indeed, like many of those who have taken high positions in a Conservative government before him, he was educated at the elite private school, Eton College, which he attended on a scholarship, and then at the University of Cambridge. A year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University followed, and then a return to Cambridge where he completed a PhD in economic history in 2000.

Ten years later, and following spells as a financial analyst in the City of London and as a columnist for the right-wing newspaper, The Telegraph, Kwarteng, who has been married to solicitor Harriet Edwards since 2019, was elected to one of the oldest legislatures in the world.

Why was his time as chancellor so short and controversial?

By the time he was picked to be chancellor by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss in September 2022, Kwarteng, the first Black Briton to occupy this lofty office of state, had cut his teeth in other ministerial roles. Under the previous prime minister, Boris Johnson, he was secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy.

However, his time at the helm of the nation’s finances took a disastrous turn when the free-market champion presented a mini-budget to Parliament, which included 45 billion pounds ($56.85bn) of unfunded tax cuts for the rich, sending the financial markets into a meltdown.

Tim Bale, politics professor at Queen Mary University London, recalled that Kwarteng’s plans “crashed the pound, put pension funds under pressure and sent interest rates shooting up, costing anyone with a mortgage far more than before and shredding the Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence”.

As a result, Truss, who had been part of the 2010 Conservative Party intake, sacked her chancellor just 38 days after first appointing him.

Kwarteng’s replacement as chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, reversed most of his predecessor’s mini-budget, but the damage to Truss’s reputation also proved politically fatal. The crisis prompted her to fall on her sword after just 44 days in office, making Truss the shortest-serving prime minister and Kwarteng one of the shortest-serving chancellors in British political history.

How have people reacted to his decision to step down as an MP?

Kwarteng, likely aware that his announcement on X would prompt many Britons to robustly remind him of his inglorious past as head of the UK Treasury, opted to disable the reply function on his post.

But that did not stop the pile-on elsewhere, with opposition politicians quick to recall Kwarteng’s time as chancellor in 2022.

Jess Phillips, a member of Parliament from the opposition Labour Party, was scathing.

“Kwasi Kwarteng made everyone’s mortgages rise, his tenure as chancellor a dangerous embarrassment,” she wrote on X.

Other Britons on social media were equally mocking, including author Otto English who posted on X: “Kwasi Kwarteng leaves a remarkable legacy. And I have every faith that his achievement will live on for decades to come. After all, not many people can claim to have wrecked the economy of a major economy in under three weeks.”

Is Kwarteng the only Conservative MP to announce he is quitting at the next election?

Far from it. Kwarteng, who, despite it all, remains widely admired for his high intellect, is just one of more than 50 Conservative parliamentarians who have decided to bail out at the next UK general election.

According to Professor Bale, recent opinion polls indicating that the opposition Labour Party will electorally wipe out the Conservatives, have made many of the party’s sitting legislators all too aware of “which way the wind appears to be blowing”.

“Many of them prefer to jump before they’re pushed by their voters – it’s easier on the ego and means they get a head-start in the post-Westminster job market, which is never as big as many assume,” said Bale.

He added, “Opposition in the UK political system is a pretty thankless task – you’ve virtually zero influence on policy and, until you look like winning again, even those journalists who used to take you out for lunch all the time lose interest in anything you have to say.”

Kwasi Kwarteng was appointed Minister of State at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on 24 July 2019.

Kwasi was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Exiting the European Union from 16 November 2018 to 24 July 2019.

Kwasi read classics and history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then attended Harvard University on a Kennedy Scholarship. He earned a PhD in economic history from the University of Cambridge in 2000.

Before becoming a Member of Parliament, Kwasi worked as an analyst in financial services.

Kwasi was elected the Conservative MP for Spelthorne in 2010. From 2010 until 2013 he was a member of the Transport Select Committee, and in 2013 he joined the Work and Pensions Select Committee where he was a member until 2015.

In October 2016 Kwasi joined the Public Accounts Committee, where he was a member until May 2017.

In 2015 Kwasi was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Leader of the House of Lords, and in 2017 he became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

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Kwasi Kwarteng's failure was to ignore his own doctoral thesis

The uk has been set back for years because the truss government didn't do its homework when it mattered.

Kwasi Kwarteng departs 11 Downing Street after stepping down as chancellor, in London on Friday. Bloomberg

Mark Carney, the Canadian-born former governor of the Bank of England, defended a decade of austerity in the UK after 2010 by saying that the country existed on the “kindness of strangers”. Kwasi Kwarteng, who was dismissed last week as the country’s chancellor of the exchequer after 38 calamitous days in the job, will go down in history as a reckless gambler with this cosy arrangement.

A product of Eton public school and Cambridge University, Mr Kwarteng tested the UK bargain with international capital to destruction. It should not have been like that. Apart from anything else, Mr Kwarteng has a doctoral thesis in the 1695 re-coinage crisis that crashed the markets the year after the Bank of England was established.

It has happened again despite the historian’s knowledge of banking, and it will take the UK years to recover what’s been lost in these weeks.

After the late September “mini-budget” that triggered the run on the pound and the crisis in UK government gilts, I spotted Norman Lamont, the last Conservative chancellor to be sacked for crashing the pound, on a London street. Now Lord Lamont, the Conservative peer looked chipper. In three decades from now, it is entirely possible that the demeanour of Mr Kwarteng will be equally sanguine. While none of us can be harbingers of fate, I’m fairly certain of it.

Which makes the moral hazard imposed by ideologues such as Mr Kwarteng for the wealth and well-being of the country all the more unpalatable. The dismissed chancellor was bumptious in power. He did none of the groundwork necessary to accomplish his ambitious attempt to reframe the UK economic model. While grounded in economic history, Mr Kwarteng and his boss, Prime Minister Liz Truss, took the view that the markets would respond positively to their announcement.

The pair had appalling timing . An inflation spiral was already causing tremors throughout global markets. The cost of energy had soared as a result of the Ukraine war. Food commodity markets were similarly blighted and feeding inflation into general prices as well.

Brexit has proved a running handicap on British trade, as firms in Europe are quietly quitting on UK customers. The pound, which was already weak, has become enfeebled. Mr Carney was quoted in a newspaper last weekend estimating that in 2016, the British economy was 90 per cent the size of Germany’s. Now six years later, it has fallen to below 70 per cent.

The Truss-Kwarteng duo came in and gave the markets special reasons to deliver further rebukes. In keeping the 2016 Brexit spirit that the country "was fed up with experts", Mr Kwarteng failed to back up his £47 billion ($52.5bn) worth of future tax cuts with benchmarking figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility. It turned out that Britain has a good, robust system of providing market transparency on its public finances. The Kwarteng method triggered unforeseen impacts on the government bond markets, in particular a debt bomb in the pensions sector that could yet go global.

The Institute for Government, a leading London-based think tank, has already published a "lessons learned" note on the calamitous chancellor. Its director, Hannah White, points out that, in making the moves that she did, Ms Truss was less interested in recognising the value of independent institutions and that she was in a “strategy designed to deflect criticism that the government has been responsible for rising interest rates”.

The UK government package had a core component of capping energy bills that, in a difficult situation, could reduce household spending on power bills from £6,000 this year to £2,500. That pledge was likely to be far costlier than the tax cuts but also served as the reason why the tax cuts were unaffordable. Now, the strategy has been completely destroyed because people are looking at monthly increases in the thousands on their mortgage bills. The crunch in what every home has to pay has started this month and, by February or March, will be truly toxic for people’s finances.

New Chancellor and former foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is acting already like he will have total scope to restore the benchmarking to the public finances. In his first set of interviews, he said taxes would have to go up. He may even be tempted to try to target the energy package, reducing its scope so that the well-off are not eligible . Unless mortgage payments come back down to, on average, double what people were paying in June this year, such tinkering would be politically impossible.

Further, Chatham House, another London-based think tank, says that until now foreign policy was made with “no consideration the UK’s ability to borrow in the markets”. In a note last week, its director said this is a luxury that the country can no longer enjoy. A worsening of trade relations with the EU would be punished afresh by the markets. Similarly, a tougher line on China that bleeds into economic relations with the East Asian giant is now not a tenable option.

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Kwarteng, Kwasi

Kwasi Kwarteng was first elected as the Conservative MP for Spelthorne in 2010, being reelected in 2019 with a majority of 18,393.

The constituency of Spelthorne is a compact seat found to the north of Surrey close to the intersection of the M25 and M3 motorways. It includes the towns of Sunbury, Stanwell, Ashford, and Staines, itself the home of the mythical TV character Ali G.  Incorporating a section of the River Thames, and a number of reservoirs, this seat is very close to Heathrow airport.  It contains a large amount of commercial property.   Although it is less affluent than some of the Surrey seats, home ownership is high in this part of England, and Spelthorne is a safe Conservative seat which has been held by the party continuously since 1950.

Kwarteng served for 38 days as Chancellor of the Exchequer between September and October 2022.  Following turmoil on the financial markets in the light of his mini-budget, Mr Kwarteng was sacked by Liz Truss.  He thus became the second shortest ever serving UK Chancellor.

Mr Kwarteng was previously regarded as a long standing ally of Liz Truss. Prior to the pair moving to their respective houses in Downing Street, Truss and Kwarteng also lived on the same street in south London.

Kwarteng sat in the Cabinet as the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy between 2021 and 2022. He was previously Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth between 2019 and 2021, and Under Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union between 2018 and 2019.

Kwasi Kwarteng was born to Ghanian parents in London in 1975.  He won a scholarship to Eton College, and proceeded to read history at Trinity College, Cambridge.  He earned a Bachelor’s degree and a PhD in British History.  He was later a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.

Prior to entering politics, Kwarteng had a number of jobs in the City.  He worked as a company analyst for a selection of banks including JP Morgan and Cazenove.

Kwarteng was once on the series winning team on University Challenge in Jeremy Paxman’s first year as the host.  For those that remember, Kwarteng did seem to answer an “extremely” high number of the questions in the competition.

In 2011, Kwarteng co-authored the pamphlet, Gridlock Nation, looking at solutions to congestion in Britain.  In 2012, Kwarteng co-authored the book Britannia Unchained with others in the Conservative Party including Priti Patel, and Dominic Raab.

Kwarteng is also the author or the book Ghosts of Empire, which narrates the global legacy of the British Empire.

Kwarteng supported Leave in the 2016 EU referendum, and backed Boris Johnson in the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election.

Kwarteng was married in 2019.  He was once reportedly in a relationship with the former Home Secretary, Amber Rudd .

Email: [email protected]

Personal Website: http://www.kwasi4spelthorne.org.uk/

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Want to understand the mini-Budget? Just look at Kwasi Kwarteng's education

By Clemmie Read

Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget, announced on 23 September, has sent shockwaves through the public and the economy alike. His Conservative list of policies saw the top rate of income tax completely scrapped, caps on bankers’ bonuses removed, and a presumable increase in the UK’s national debt, all in order to grow Britain’s economy and end the cost-of-living crisis.

The sterling plummeted; and Labour’s popularity skyrocketed. The general election on the horizon now looks like a fight between ideologically right- and left-wing positions for the first time in decades. Behind it all is the Conservative drive of Kwarteng himself. It is rooted in a lifetime of serious study, a long intellectual formulation of this laissez-faire approach. The economics editor of The Guardian called the mini-Budget a ‘schoolboy error’: whether it proves an error or a success, it clearly finds its beginnings in Kwarteng’s schooldays.

Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng walks out of Number 11 Downing Street on his way to unveil an anti-inflation budget plan in London on September 23, 2022

Kwarteng’s education was a serious and ambitious proposition from the outset. His parents, a leading barrister and a centre-left economist, moved him from his local state school in Waltham Forest, to board at West London prep school Colet Court aged eight. As the son of Ghanaian immigrants, he told The Times in 2014, he had a ‘slight pressure to do well but then you internalise that; I wanted to do well at studies, I quite liked winning prizes’.

More specifically, he was teased for his ‘funny name’: but, when ‘you found a skill, people let you get on with it,’ he said. His response was hard work, and standout academic success from the beginning. He won the Harrow History Prize, a national history competition, then won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, and at Eton won the Newcastle scholarship (a prestigious school philosophy exam which Boris Johnson had also won).

An Eton contemporary remembers him as ‘definitely one of the stars of the year - supremely confident, a bit nerdy.’ Confident indeed: 6 foot 4 inches and a school prefect, he famously ended his Cambridge interview by kindly reassuring the nervous young tutor ‘Oh, don’t worry, sir, you did fine’. Again, this success is put down to an awareness of racial dynamics. ‘The school was hugely racist in those days, in a very casual way,' opines the contemporary, 'so the Black/Asian students who really made it and cut through tended to be absolutely indomitably assured figures.’

By Harriet Johnston

By Isaac Bickerstaff

Eton College, Windsor, Berkshire

At Eton he was already a notable politico: Kwarteng and his friend Danny Kruger, the Conservative MP and son of Prue Leith, were loud supporters of laissez-faire economics even then, ‘in a way that was quite noticeably unusual, even though we were all quite into our politics at Eton in those days’. Kwarteng has recalled another good friend who had posters of Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, all over his walls.

At Trinity College, Cambridge, Kwarteng stayed out of the political scene. He first hit the papers on University Challenge in 1995, when he buzzed, panicked, and went ‘Oh f**k, I’ve forgotten [...] Oh f**k!’’, which led to a Sun article entitled ‘Rudiversity Challenge’ - nevertheless, Kwarteng and his team won the competition.

He befriended Tristram Hunt, future Labour shadow minister, and joined the Pitt Club, Cambridge’s elite dining society. ‘Everyone loved him,’ a source says to Tatler ; ‘he was really popular, very easy-going and fun. He wasn’t a swot, he’s just so clever; he gets it instantly.’ He read classics and history, in which he got a double first, and still composes Latin poetry. His tutor, Professor Tim Whitmarsh, described him as a ‘bit of a young fogey’, remembered seeing Kwarteng ‘in full brown tweed bumbling around with a pipe in his mouth on a baking hot day.’

‘He’s very cerebral, he thinks everything through very carefully,’ continues the source. ‘Nothing is done on an ad-hoc basis; he will have used proper economic historical precedent to form the Budget. He hasn’t plucked this out of thin air: this is a result of decades of research, understanding, looking at precedents, and deep thought.’ It is certainly an economic risk; but it is deep and long-calculated.

The top offices of state have all gone to non-white men for the first time in history

By Rebecca Cope

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng visit Berkeley Modular, on September 23, 2022 in Northfleet, England

Economic history would later become Kwarteng’s speciality: after attending Harvard on a Kennedy Scholarship, he returned to Cambridge for a PhD on ‘the recoinage crisis of 1695-97’. Although he joined J. P. Morgan when he failed to win an academic fellowship, and joined the government in 2010, Kwarteng is a historian in all but (chief) profession. While an MP he wrote Ghosts of Empire and the economic history War and Gold , as well as treatises on Conservative policy including the controversial Britannia Unchained (co-authors included Liz Truss and Dominic Raab).

Lady Swire called Kwarteng ‘essentially an academic' in Diary of an MP's Wife , and as a historian and a thinker, he is clearly a serious talent. In government, however, he has set out to be a pragmatist, not an ideologue: his mantra is ‘MSH’ (Making Sh*t Happen). Whether the laissez-faire ideas he formed in these hallowed institutions will work in practice as well as he finds they do in theory remains to be seen. It might be his riskiest intellectual experiment yet.

By Isaac Zamet

By Ollie Macnaughton

Kwasi Kwarteng's awkward moment on University Challenge where he swore twice

The newly-appointed Chancellor faced Jeremy Paxman on the show in 1995, and got so panicked over failing to answer the questions correctly that he swore twice during the episode

• 09:29, 23 Sep 2022
• Updated 09:36, 23 Sep 2022

The newly-appointed Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is under sharp focus today as he unveils his highly-anticipated 'mini budget' amidst the cost of living crisis and recession. In a bid to deliver Liz Truss ' ambitions for economic growth, Kwarteng is set to announce sweeping tax cuts that critics claim will aid the rich far more than the poor, with national insurance, corporation tax and stamp duty all set to be reduced.

Kwarteng has been a long-time ally of the prime minister, and landed the job just three weeks ago after Liz Truss beat Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership contest. The Chancellor's connection to fiscal policy is no surprise, as his father was an economist. Mr Kwarteng followed the footsteps of most politicians as we went to Eton College before studying classics and history at the University of Cambridge.

For more details on the Chancellor's mini budget, follow our liveblog

During his stint at the prestigious university, the now-Chancellor enjoyed his first moment in the spotlight when he appeared on University Challenge.

His first TV gig as a contestant was very different to the formal and composed politician we'll see making the budget announcement this morning, as Mr Kwarteng made some rather awkward blunders on the show and even swore twice.

The politician was just 19-years-old when he rocked up to feature on University Challenge for the first time, and came under pressure when quizzed by broadcasting legend Jeremy Paxman during the show in 1995.

When Mr Kwarteng failed to come to the right answer, he couldn't hide his frustrations. After buzzing to answer one of the questions, he said "Oh f***, I've forgotten".

Things only got worse during the stressful TV appearance, as the Chancellor panicked and continued to blurt out the same expletive once more.

His uncouth language even made headlines in the press at the time, as it episode was mockingly dubbed "Rudiversity Challenge" by The Sun.

All was not lost, however, as Mr Kwarteng and his pals from Trinity College Cambridge went on to be crowned champions of University Challenge later that year.

He also went on to study a PhD in economic history from Cambridge, but not before he attended the prestigious Harvard University in the US on a scholarship.

The Chancellors 'mini budget' comes one day after he announced a cut in National Insurance from 13.25% back down to 12% - the level it was at before the Tory hike in April.

The government is facing pressure to further address the cost of living crisis that is hitting the most vulnerable the hardest, with the budget coming on the backdrop of soaring inflation and hiked interest rates.

Do you have a story to share? Email us at [email protected]

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Kwasi Kwarteng: an Eton tough nut with legendary self-confidence

Stories of the under-fire chancellor’s self-assurance abound. Colleagues see him as unlikely to back down without a fight

In recent years, Bill Gates held a roundtable discussion to which Kwasi Kwarteng was invited as a senior minister.

The billionaire was hosting the meeting, surrounded by high-profile guests. But according to observers, when Kwarteng turned up, he began to act as if he was the one in charge of the meeting “offering his opinion on everything” and “lecturing” Gates about the businessman’s own expert subject. It was “bizarre and embarrassing” to watch, according to one person with knowledge of the episode.

A tendency to arrogance – but also undoubted cleverness – is a common theme that many people who have worked with the new chancellor seem to report. This was the case even among fellow Tories, before he angered them with his politically and economically explosive mini-budget.

One former cabinet minister who worked with Kwarteng as business secretary described him as having “the concentration span of a gnat” and an inability to sit through anything other than very short meetings. “He was never remotely interested in other people’s point of view,” the former minister said.

“I found him very odd to deal with … but there is an intellectual arrogance about Kwasi and Liz [Truss] and Jacob [Rees-Mogg] and those four to five people at the top. They genuinely do think they are cleverer than anyone else and that other people’s views are slightly tiresome.”

A second former cabinet minister told another MP just last week they had found him “extremely difficult” to get on with.

And a third Tory MP who has worked closely with Kwarteng called him “the worst combination of laziness and arrogance”. They said that, as Truss could not easily be ousted, the chancellor would have to go. “It just won’t work with both of them in the driving seat.”

To Kwarteng’s supporters though, his directness is an asset. One ally said: “Kwasi has a brilliant mind and is unbelievably intelligent, but sometimes too impatient and direct.

“Some ministers can be too risk averse, worry too much about negative media and end up making next to no progress. The same can’t be said for Kwasi. He knows what he wants, can communicate that brilliantly, and the people he works with tend to respect that.”

A high degree of confidence in his own opinions could certainly explain why Kwarteng, 47, is refusing to back down on his economic plans in the face of market turmoil.

Born in Waltham Forest, north-east London, Kwarteng went to Eton college on a scholarship, and later Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and history. His parents – an economist and barrister – emigrated from Ghana as students.

The story of his university interview has become well known: that he was interviewed by a young lecturer who told him it was his first time interviewing candidates. Kwarteng, then 18, reassured him: “Don’t worry, sir, you did fine.” He is also famed for having said “fuck” twice under his breath in the final of University Challenge when he could not answer a question about donkeys, leading to an apology from the BBC.

In profiles of him at the time, school contemporaries described him as being “pretty tough” because he had played “first wall in the wall game” – an Eton sport – that “basically involves having your head ground into a brick wall for an hour”.

Extremely tall, with a foghorn voice, he is a linguist who can speak French, Italian, German, Greek and a bit of Arabic. After leaving university, a young Kwarteng entered the City as a financial analyst for JP Morgan, and later a hedge fund, Odey Asset Management, founded by the Tory donor Crispin Odey who has recently been shorting the pound.

He also wrote history books, including a critical book about empire, as well as acquiring a Daily Telegraph column at the height of Blairism in 1997. Among his musings was an entire column on the “nipple count” of FHM magazine, how it was read by ABC1s and not a “lumpen proletariat”, and how laddishness had become a “symptom of the success of material culture”.

He was elected to the safe Surrey seat of Spelthorne in 2010, but did not particularly prosper politically during the coalition years.

He co-authored Britannia Unchained with three other rising stars of the Tory right – Truss, Chris Skidmore and Dominic Raab – which described British workers as some of the “worst idlers in the world”. But whereas Truss rose through the ranks, Kwarteng was left behind, spending years producing policy papers for libertarian thinktanks.

As a backbencher, Kwarteng did little of note for nearly seven years. But he began to climb the ranks in the last year of Theresa May’s government as a Brexit minister, and then under Boris Johnson, becoming first a business minister in 2019 and then business secretary in 2021. During that time, he married a City lawyer, Harriet, and the couple had their first child, a daughter, last year.

While some officials report him being abrasive, others describe him more positively as having been willing to fight the department’s corner, particularly against the Treasury. One said his colleagues had appreciated that he grasped the importance of the energy brief and saw the potential for expansion of onshore wind, while being dismissive of the merits of fracking.

Another official in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, where Kwarteng was secretary of state for 18 months, said he was “was willing to do what it took to understand the issues and solve problems”.

He has been a friend of Truss for a long time. The pair live within a few roads of each other in Greenwich. Over the summer, they met to plan their tax-cutting economic prospectus, with a focus on being bold and tolerance of unpopularity.

Whether those goals and ideology can survive the present storm is in question. But some Conservative MPs believe from what they know about Kwarteng that he, like Truss, is reluctant ever to back down without a fight.

• Kwasi Kwarteng
• Conservatives
• Economic policy

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Trevor Phillips live: Chancellor set to face tough questions after '£100k not a huge salary' claim

Jeremy Hunt is set to face scrutiny this morning after he claimed that earning £100,000 per year was not a "huge" salary. Watch Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips live by clicking the livestream below - or follow along here in this blog for the latest updates.

Sunday 24 March 2024 07:45, UK

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• Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips is live from 8.30am - watch or follow along here
• £100,000 a year 'not a huge salary', Chancellor Jeremy Hunt claims
• Morning summary
• Adam Boulton: Quitter politicians - an impossible job or the wrong people at the wrong time?
• Man removed from plane after row with DUP leader
• Electoral Dysfunction: Is Sunak embattled or beleaguered?
• Listen to the latest episode above and  tap here to follow wherever you get your podcasts
• Live reporting by Ollie Cooper

Councils are increasingly ­rejecting requests to assess children for ­special needs such as autism due to massive financial challenges in the education sector, new data suggests.

Figures seen by the Observer suggest long-term underfunding and rising demand has left many councils facing significant deficits on their schools budgets.

Councils in England have responded by increasingly turning down requests for education, health and care needs assessments (EHCNAs), freedom of information data sourced by the website Special Needs Jungle  shows. 

Figures from 107 English councils show that - on average - they refused 26.4% of requests for an EHCNA in 2023, up from 21.6% in 2022.

"Councils are refusing EHC needs assessments at an unprecedented rate, but the legal threshold for securing an EHC needs assessment hasn't changed," said Tania Tirraoro, co-director of Special Needs Jungle. 

A man has been removed from a plane at Heathrow Airport after he was involved in a row with DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, it has emerged. 

Police confirmed the passenger was removed from the flight on Wednesday evening following a "verbal altercation" with the Northern Ireland politician.

The DUP declined to comment but a party source confirmed a man had been verbally abusive towards Sir Jeffrey.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said: "At around 5.30pm on Wednesday, March 20, airline staff at Heathrow Airport made police aware of a verbal altercation involving two male passengers during boarding.

"One man was removed from the flight. There were no arrests."

Earlier this year, Sir Jeffrey told parliament how he had been subjected to threats as he continued his negotiations with the UK government over a deal on post-Brexit trading arrangements.

Police investigated the matter but found no criminal offences linked to the alleged threats.

By Adam Boulton , political commentator 

There goes another one. 

The Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar announced this week that he is quitting at the age of 45, explaining: "I don't feel I'm the best person for that job any more."

He is just the latest in a spate of national leaders to stand down voluntarily when seemingly at the peak of their powers.

Last year New Zealand's former prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, found she had "no more in the tank" aged 43.

Nicola Sturgeon went at 53 to spend "a little bit more time on Nicola Sturgeon the human being", since being first minister of Scotland "takes its toll on you".

Politicians at the very top are not the only ones calling an early end to their careers.

From resigning prime ministers to departing MPs - something must be going wrong if politics only holds such a passing attraction for people of talent.

Read on here ...

Jeremy Hunt will be facing some tough questions this morning from Trevor Phillips - after it emerged the chancellor claimed that earning £100,000 a year is "not a huge salary".

Our political reporter Tim Baker has more... 

Mr Hunt made the remark on social media platform X, in a post which was aimed at his constituents in Surrey.

He will be campaigning hard as he is changing seats for the next general election after the boundaries were redrawn as part of a regular review.

In the post on his profile, Mr Hunt said: "I spoke to a lady from Godalming about eligibility for the government's childcare offer which is not available if one parent is earning over £100k.

"That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay."

Mr Hunt increased the threshold for childcare benefits in his most recent budget.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the average salary for someone in full-time work was £34,963 in April 2023.

Mr Hunt is standing for the Godalming and Ash constituency, having represented the Farnham and Haslemere constituency.

Paul Follows, a Liberal Democrat councillor who is standing against Mr Hunt in Godalming and Ash, said: "Perhaps this is the case when you are a multi-millionaire who can funnel 100k+ into his own campaign without breaking a sweat - but it's great deal more than the national or local average and a massive indicator as to why the cost of living crisis impacting residents across the country seems to have missed him totally."

It was recently announced by the independent body IPSA that MPs would get a salary rise from £86,584 to £91,346 for the next financial year.

As a senior cabinet minister, Mr Hunt takes an extra ministerial salary of around £67,000 - meaning his earnings from politics are around £150,000.

Welcome back to the Politics Hub for another Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips , which kicks off at 8.30am live on Sky News.

But before then, here's what is making headlines today:

The chancellor claimed that earning £100,000 a year is "not a huge salary";

A row has erupted over the new Nike England football team kit - with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warning that Nike "should not mess" with the English flag while Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged the firm to "reconsider" the design;

A man has been removed from a plane at Heathrow Airport after he was involved in a row with DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson;

A new £24m border control post may have to be demolished because repeated changes to post-Brexit border arrangements have left it commercially unviable.

Here's who will appear on Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips today:

• Chancellor of the Exchequer  Jeremy Hunt ;
• Labour Party Chair and show minister for women and equality Anneliese Dodds ;
• Our international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn and global coverage editor at the Wall Street Journal Gordon Fairclough;
• Human rights activist Dame Sara Khan

Follow along for the very latest politics news.

As the prime minister tries to shake off rumours of a Tory coup and faces more delays to his Rwanda legislation - Beth Rigby, Ruth Davidson and Jess Phillips discuss where his leadership is at. 

What could happen if the local elections on 2 May end badly for Rishi Sunak? 

Although he's standing down, they think Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar is having a better week – was this a good time for him to go? 

And two politicians answer a listener question about why politicians never answer the question. 

Email Beth, Ruth, and Jess at  [email protected] , post on X to @BethRigby, or send a WhatsApp voice note on 07934 200 444. 

Warning: some explicit language.

The chancellor has claimed that earning £100,000 a year is "not a huge salary".

Jeremy Hunt made the remark on social media platform X, in a post which was aimed at his constituents in Surrey.

You can read more here:

There will most likely be a general election at some point in 2024, but we don't know exactly when. 

Rishi Sunak has said it will not happen on 2 May - when local elections will take place across England. 

The prime minister's "working assumption" is that it will be in the second half of this year, but beyond that we know very little more about the precise timing.

So why is this the case?

Political correspondent Serena Barker-Singh explains:

Diane Abbott has given her reaction to the news West Yorkshire Police are investigating alleged racist remarks made about her by Tory donor Frank Hester (see 09.37 post).

She told Sky News in a statement: "I reported Mr Hester's alleged racist remarks and threats of violence to the Metropolitan Police. So I am glad that an investigation is now taking place.

"The alleged remarks took place in Leeds, so the Metropolitan Police are working together with the West Yorkshire police on the investigation. 

"Women in public life should not have to live in fear, so I hope that this investigation is brought to a speedy conclusion."

A single graduate in the UK has £231,000 of student debt, new figures show.

Campaigners have described the figure as "jaw dropping" - and claim it is evidence tuition fees are in dire need of reform.

The government-owned Student Loans Company, which released the figures, say this balance belongs to a Plan 2 borrower, meaning it could only have been taken out after 2012.

In another case, a single loan has attracted interest of more than £54,000.

Read the full story here...

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