hey have been friends for more than a decade and became neighbours earlier this year when Kwasi Kwarteng upped sticks to the same Greenwich street as Liz Truss.
The move, which those who know them say is a sign of their close relationship, could be a dress rehearsal for when the foreign secretary becomes prime minister as predicted.
Kwarteng and Truss, both 47, are said to have drawn up a pact to make him chancellor if she wins the Tory leadership election in just over a fortnight.
“Kwasi and Liz make quite a pair and they are a bit like Batman and Robin, backing each other up,” the friend said.
“They are both slight social misfits, amiable geeks, and have strong views which are in tune with each other.
“For example, if I was Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, I would be packing my bags now because they both think he could have done more to curb inflation.”
It is a remarkable turnaround for someone earmarked by Boris Johnson to be shuffled out of his job as business minister in June, something that left him “very upset”.
He is described by friends as “intensely private” and unlike other MPs also elected in 2010, such as Truss, Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, is not known widely to the public.
An only child of Ghanaian migrants who came to the country as students in the 1960s, Kwarteng was born in east London in 1975.
His father, Alfred, an economist for the Commonwealth Secretariat, was educated in Ghana at an Anglican school with a Winchester-educated English headmaster.
His mother, Charlotte, a successful barrister who is head of her chambers, helped instil in him a work ethic which allowed his natural gifts to flourish.
“Charlotte is a particularly important figure in his life. She is religious and ingrained a love of public service in him,” according to a friend.
After being sent away to the fee-paying prep school Colet Court — now St Paul’s Juniors — in west London aged eight, he won a scholarship to Eton, where friends said he was considered one of its brightest pupils.
“He has an incredible skill for languages and he upset the teachers when they introduced Italian to the curriculum.
“The teachers were trying to teach rudimentary Italian but Kwasi learnt the whole language. The teachers were struggling to keep up with him,” according to the friend.
As well as Italian he knows French, Greek and German, and writes poetry in Latin. It is perhaps because of his alma mater, love of classics and “untidy demeanour” that he has drawn comparisons with Boris Johnson.
Like Johnson, Kwarteng was a keen player of Eton’s Wall Game, a strange hybrid of football and rugby. One Etonian said Kwarteng “played in an almost suicidal position that involved spending much of the match having his head scraped against brickwork”.
Also like Johnson, Kwarteng won the Newcastle scholarship, the school’s most prestigious prize, for achieving the highest marks in a special week-long exam.
At 6ft 5in, he is described as a big man, both physically and intellectually, and is said to have told the young scholar performing his interview for Trinity College, Cambridge: “Oh, don’t worry, sir, you did fine.”
The young scholar, now Professor James Clackson, said: “I can’t remember him saying it but it was my first year interviewing and it may be true. I remember Kwasi as a very talented student.”
Friends who knew him at university described him as “supremely confident, but not arrogant,” adding: “He might seem brisk or dismissive, but it is the quality of someone’s ideas he is concerned with. He would never dream about being rude about someone personally. He is basically an academic.”
He gained notoriety on campus as a first-year student after appearing on, and winning, University Challenge in 1995. He was featured on page three of The Sun newspaper under the headline “Rudiversity Challenge” when a microphone picked up him saying the F-word after being unable to recall an answer.
Professor Tim Whitmarsh, who taught him Latin and Greek, described him as “a bit of a young fogey”.
He said: “I once saw a 19-year-old Kwasi in full brown tweed bumbling around with a pipe in his mouth on a baking hot summer’s day.
“He was very well trained in, and naturally gifted at, Latin and Greek; but his heart wasn’t fully in Classics. In his final year he switched to History. He got a double first: a first in Part I Classics in 1995, and a first in Part II History in 1996.”
It was during this time that he was taken under the wing of Dr John Casey, an English fellow and legendary figure among conservative thinkers who organised a dining club attended by politicians and prominent figures in society.
The club, called the Michael Oakeshott Association, was where Sarah Sands talent-spotted Kwarteng while she was deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph and gave him a column, making him a stablemate of Johnson.
She said: “I had been quite dazzled by his intellectual brilliance and thought he might give Boris a run for his money.
“I also used him shamelessly as a ringer for quiz nights. He has a hinterland, he is not a political obsessive: it also makes him philosophical about political ambition.”
According to a friend at university, Kwarteng “had quite a few girlfriends — he had catching up to do after his boys’ private school upbringing”.
They added: “Interestingly, those girlfriends have had quite ‘worthy’ careers, at the United Nations, the Body Shop and so on. I wonder what they make of Kwasi’s career.
“I don’t think anyone would have predicted he would have gone on to do something political. Usually, Oxford is where people from politics come from; Cambridge isn’t really like that.
“But at his dining club he was exposed to and became friends with people like Norman Lamont, Geoffrey Howe, Lord Tebbit and Charles Moore.”
According to the former Labour MP Tristram Hunt, his university roommate, Kwarteng had to belatedly include a number of “additions” to his doctoral thesis on the 17th century recoinage crisis because it was composed in a rush.
He told The Times: “He tried to finish his PhD very quickly, in about 18 months, but he had to make additions. Kwasi likes to get along with stuff, he doesn’t like to hang around.”
When asked if this desire to do things quickly is the reason why Kwarteng has the letters MSH, short for Make S*** Happen, on the wall at the Department of Business, Hunt objects: “That suggests organisational intent, which was never at the top of his list of priorities.”
Kwarteng won a Kennedy scholarship to Harvard University, before coming back to Cambridge to study for a doctorate in economic history.
He worked as a fund manager at the bank JP Morgan as well as chairing the Bow Group, a conservative think tank.
In 2005 he stood as the Conservative MP for Brent East, coming third, before being elected as MP for the safe Tory seat Spelthorne in Surrey in 2010, the same year as Truss.
In 2012 he co-wrote a book, Britannia Unchained, with Truss and other MPs including Priti Patel and Chris Skidmore, in which they claimed: “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.”
The authors swore not to reveal which of them wrote each chapter in a cabinet-style vow of collective responsibility. He is a devotee of Margaret Thatcher and has an ardent belief in free markets though his dealings with the energy industry have softened his views on state intervention.
He is extremely loyal to the party and was once forced to defend Sunak, who he dislikes, over his wife’s tax affairs.
However, he is not afraid to speak his mind over issues of policy and once aired his criticisms of George Osborne’s Help to Buy scheme, something that he and others believe stymied his political ambitions early on in his career.
A friend said: “He has strong views and is not the type to toe the party line. David Cameron and Osborne are slick politicians and Kwasi is not like that, although he has definitely changed his image, from the scruffy Professor Brainstorm at university to something a bit more corporate now.”
While he has smartened up his wardrobe, he still maintains an air of “geeky scruffiness”.
Baroness Tina Stowell, for whom he was made Parliamentary Private Secretary in 2015 when she was Leader of the House of Lords, said: “He’s very affable, quite easy to tease and I would have to do things like straighten his tie.
“I was worried when he was given the job whether he would be that interested. He’s obviously ambitious and with the greatest respect, working for me was not the most influential of positions.
“But he took the role seriously. He would go out of his way to get stuck in. He was a bit untidy and unkempt, but that’s part of his charm.
“I never saw him angry, apart from when Boris Johnson announced he wasn’t going to stand to be leader in 2016. He was a backer of Boris and it really upset him how it was handled, he felt it was like student politics.”
At the press conference when Johnson announced he would not stand after Michael Gove declined to endorse him, one journalist said Kwarteng’s reaction was telling.
“Despite being a huge backer of Boris, and sitting in the front row at the press conference, in the immediate aftermath he was singing the praises of Theresa May, who had now become favourite. It seemed to me that he knew how to play the game,” they said.
In 2017 he was made Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the chancellor, Philip Hammond and afterwards was overheard telling someone “It took Stanley Baldwin eight years to become a PPS and he then became prime minister seven years later. I’ve become a PPS in seven.”
In 2018 he received his first ministerial role, in the Brexit department and in 2019 his support of Johnson’s claim to be leader was rewarded as he was Minister of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
He loves to gossip and has an infectious laugh. Sources said he is intolerant of those not on top of their brief and claims that he is a lazy minister are said to annoy him.
He became the first black Tory MP to lead a government department when he was made secretary of state in 2021.
Mark Fletcher MP, a former department colleague, said: “He’s obviously fiercely bright and serious but he’s also a huge cricket fan and if you can explain things to him in a cricket analogy you will always get his attention.”
At one point Kwarteng was in a relationship with Amber Rudd, the former home secretary, but the pair split up and he met Harriet Edwards, a lawyer he went on to marry and with whom he had a daughter, Ida, last year.
In January this year they sold their flat in Bayswater for £650,000 and bought a house for more than £1 million in Greenwich, on the same road as Truss, earning them the moniker of the Greenwich Gang.
A friend said his wife “is from the corporate world and doesn’t really understand why her husband is passionate about dead languages and is involved in politics when he could be earning a lot more money doing something else”.
Regarding his current political views, a friend said: “Kwasi has a low opinion of Rishi Sunak and I’m sure there will be a clear-out at the Treasury.
“Rishi has the slick signature he puts on all his carefully choreographed photo opportunities — Kwasi is the opposite of that.
“He was completely against the decision to increase National Insurance, as he sees it as a punishment on working people.
“The idea that they will delay an audit of the finances before an emergency budget has Kwasi written all over it — his view is what good have these economic experts been so far?
“He used to believe quite ardently against bailing things out but through his role overseeing the energy industry he has realised that sometimes it is necessary.
“I think we will see more of that if he becomes chancellor.”
Source: Thetimes.co.uk