The real Kwasi Kwarteng — by the insiders who know him best

Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng was appointed as a parliamentary private secretary to the chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond, in 2017 he bumped into an old friend from university at Henley Royal Regatta. He had clearly had a few drinks and was expansive in setting out his delight at finally getting a junior job at the Treasury, a department he had studied for so long as an economic historian at Cambridge and Harvard. “He told me that, while it had taken him seven years since becoming an MP to get the job, he’d discovered that Stanley Baldwin took eight years and was prime minister seven years later,” the friend recalls.

There is no doubting Kwarteng’s determination to get to the top. His swaggering performance in