Kwasi Kwarteng: The chancellor with a tough task ahead

The former business secretary’s delicate political manoeuvring has served him well, including backing Liz Truss. But, asks Tom Peck, is ideological fantasy about to hit reality?

In some ways, Kwarteng’s greatest strength is to think himself so vastly superior to all around him, that it is in effect impossible for him to be made to look a fool (PA)

Kwasi Kwarteng is a shining example of how politics is not quite as easy as people tend to think.

Kwarteng, 47, is blessed with sufficient intellect to win a scholarship to Eton, to complete a PhD at Cambridge on the “Political Thought of the Recoinage Crisis of 1695 to 1697”, to win a further scholarship to Harvard, various medals for Latin and Greek poetry and also to win University Challenge.

Yet he does not appear capable of not making himself appear ridiculous almost every time he goes on television. As one of the most impossibly highly self-regarding men in all of Westminster, one suspects Kwarteng does not consider Sky News’s Kay Burley (to take one random example) to be his intellectual superior. But he has, on very many occasions, failed to provide any supporting evidence for such a belief, should he happen to hold it.