Kwasi Kwarteng: I’d Do It All Again

Associate Editor Rayhan Hussain sits down with former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, who offers a candid account of the Truss mini-budget, the market fallout, his critique of Britain’s economic orthodoxy – and why he remains unrepentant about the case for growth.

The first thing you notice about Kwasi Kwarteng is that he is a man who is done with apologising and is intent on setting out a theory of how things went so wrong.

After an hour holding court with postgraduates on the inner workings of the British state – Treasury orthodoxy, the Bank of England’s reach, the influence of the OBR – he meets me in a stuffy side room, fresh pint in hand. There’s something oddly cheerful and un-self-conscious about it; a former Chancellor necking beers as if he’s still decompressing from a job that lasted 38 days but refuses to leave the bloodstream.

The impression matters because the simplest story about Kwarteng is a morality tale; the ideologue who spooked the markets and learned nothing. In person, he’s something more irritating to his critics and more useful to his admirers – a political intellectual who believes fundamentally in Britain’s imperative for a growth agenda and a historian who insists that crises are rarely the product of a single bad decision.

That confidence is not the confidence of ignorance, it lies in an inherent belief that the system is broken.

Kwarteng’s CV reads like an overachieving fever dream. Scholarship at Eton; Classics and History at Cambridge; a Kennedy Scholarship year at Harvard; then back to Cambridge for a PhD in economic history. After university, he went into the City as a financial analyst at JP Morgan. His political calling came in 2010 when he was elected Conservative MP for Spelthorne and soon enough began to climb the ministerial ladder. 

He tells a story about governing that is less heroic than it is exhausted. As Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU under Theresa May – a “period of complete mayhem” – he remembers having to respond to three urgent questions in one week in the Commons and “making up the answers” by the Friday. Under Boris Johnson as Business and Energy Secretary during the pandemic, he says he realised the sums being spent were “extortionate”, and would shape the country’s landscape for “the next five, ten, even twenty years”.

Those years in government finally paved the way for his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liz Truss in September 2022, lasting an astonishing 38 days in the post until he was, in his own words, “sacked on Twitter” on his way back from an IMF meeting in Washington. In the Cabinet Room, Truss wept as she delivered the news.

That short but consequential period is the predominant focus of his address to students. In the lecture, he makes an argument that is both self-serving and, uncomfortably, persuasive: Britain’s governing system is increasingly dominated by institutions that are not democratically accountable – and that ministers often only discover the limits of their power when it is too late.

“The Chancellor’s relationship with the Prime Minister is the most important relationship in government,” he says. Then he rewinds to a moment that taught him how power actually feels. As Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Philip Hammond – “a bag carrier,” he jokes – he was close enough to observe the Treasury from the inside. What struck him, he says, was the numerical imbalance; “thousands of civil servants” and, by his recollection, only “eight MPs” working in the department. The point, he reflects, was not just the staffing imbalance but the intrinsic culture. He refers to the Treasury as an “accounting function” of government, where growth is sacrificed on the altar of caution.

His interpretation is not crude. In fact, he is careful to talk about “a Treasury orthodoxy rather than the orthodoxy”, as if there are competing schools of thought rather than one grey monolith. But the implication and his own experience are clear cut. If you come to the Treasury with something that looks anything close to a political project, the machine will treat you like a temporary irritant.

That view forms the backdrop of his defence of the events of Autumn 2022.

Kwarteng himself is shaped by Thatcherite individualism and an obsession with growth, productivity, dynamism, and a suspicion of cosy British stagnation. He and Truss, he says, were trying to solve what they saw as an obvious problem. Taxes were far too high and an instinct to continue raising them would damage long-term growth.

The tragedy, in his own summary, is not that the idea was mad. It’s that the execution was.

Truss, he tells me, wanted everything “out immediately”. He describes “mission creep”, “excitement and euphoria” – and the intoxication of finally getting to do the thing you campaigned so fervently for. But he concedes the big unforced error: “Cutting out the OBR was a mistake.” If he had his time again, he would “spread it out” and consult the watchdog.

Even his explanation for the collapse of the Truss government follows this multi-factor logic. He argues that the “LDI crisis” – liability-driven investment stress in pension funds – “killed the government”, and claims the Bank knew about the risk while “the Treasury didn’t.” Whether or not one buys the emphasis, it is consistent with his larger point: politics is increasingly at the mercy of systems whose failure modes are opaque, technical, and fast.

That tension between conviction and regret is what makes the postscript of the Truss era so corrosive. Truss has spent the years since painstakingly arguing that she was right, and that the institutional bureaucracy and the establishment were equally to blame. Kwarteng is noticeably more reflective, pensive even. When I put it to him that her refusal to spend more time reflecting risks further damage to the Conservatives’ economic credibility, he doesn’t attack her. He doesn’t fully endorse her either.

“I think generally if things go wrong, when you are a leader, it can’t be everyone else’s fault,” he says. “There’s got to be an element in which you have some personal responsibility. Because, otherwise, why are you a leader?”

Then, a line that sounds like it has been sitting in his head for years, waiting for someone to ask in a quiet room rather than a studio: “I am a great believer in ‘the buck stops here’ – what Truman said when he was president.”

He is fair to Truss in the way allies are fair when they are trying not to sound disloyal. “Was she to blame for everything? Of course not. There were lots of other things going on. I think a lot of what she says makes sense.” But the refusal to accept any share of the blame is, to him, almost a moral offence. “You can’t put 100% of the blame on everyone else.”

His institutional critique, however, is where our conversation turns from personal judgement to something close to a governing philosophy.

Pressed on whether he agreed with Andy Burnham’s claim that Britain is “in hock to the bond markets” – whether elected politicians really have meaningful power over fiscal policy – Kwarteng reaches for a broader phenomenon: the rise of powerful, unelected actors across the Western world, and the political backlash that follows.

“Clearly over the last 20-30 years in particular, NGOs, people outside government have had a great influence on things that happen”, he says. “The worry and the concern is that these people are not democratically accountable.”

He lists the usual suspects: the Bank of England, the OBR, “large portions of the Treasury itself.” The danger, he says, is that the voters can’t see who is responsible for decisions affecting their everyday lives. They don’t know whether these institutions are accountable, whether they “have their best interests at heart.” He reaches for Donald Trump as the cautionary example: that whatever you think of Trump, his rise reflects a “fundamental concern” about how government works and how elites are perceived.

This is why Kwarteng is simultaneously sceptical of the ‘deep state’ narrative peddled by his former boss but sympathetic to the instinct behind it. Asked directly if he believes in the existence of a British ‘deep state’, he rejects the puppeteer version. “No, really,” he says. There is an “establishment, corporate view,” yes – but “these aren’t the masters of the universe controlling everything.” Ministers still have “agency”.

Then the historian in him takes over. “There’s never one cause,” he says. “There are lots of different causes. It’s a concatenation. If you write an essay about the French Revolution and said there was one cause, you’d probably fail the essay. And, as you should!”

It is an elegant way of saying: yes, we made mistakes – but the system also failed, and the same system is still there.

It’s also a neat bridge to the present woes facing our current political generation. As Kwarteng makes his case against the over-mighty forecast culture of the modern British state, the current Chancellor has been living through it in real time. Rachel Reeves’ second budget, delivered in late November 2025, unveiled £26 billion in tax rises. In the same period, Reeves has had to contend with the fragility of the markets and the unpredictability of the OBR’s shifting forecasts in shaping her fiscal framework. You don’t need to share Kwarteng’s worldview to see why he feels even a bit vindicated. Even Chancellors who are trying to play by the institutional rules find themselves defined by forecasts, leaks, and the nervous psychology of the markets.

If all of this risks becoming abstract, Kwarteng is most vivid when pulled back to the specifics of 2022. I ask him which single measure from the mini-budget he’d keep, and he chooses corporation tax. Specifically, reversing the planned rise in the tax from 19% to 25%. “I didn’t think it was a good idea. It wasn’t even a mini-budget proposal, we kept it at 19% and I was very keen that we did that,” he tells me. The corporation tax rise ended up happening anyway under Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt in 2023.

Towards the end of our conversation, I tackle the current political stakes with the former occupant of No.11. 

The Conservative Party’s approach to Reform UK and the possibility of a pre-election pact/merger? “I don’t think a merger will happen before the election. There could be an unofficial pact, but it wouldn’t be written in stone,” he predicts. The short-term outlook for the Conservatives is grim: “We won 121 seats at the last election, the lowest ever,” he says, and polling since has been “even lower.” In the longer term, he thinks the party can pull itself back from the brink. But for now, he describes his party’s predicament as “a rocky patch.”

Would he consider returning to frontline politics? “Probably not.” But he intends to remain “a voice.” British politics, he says, “has never been more interesting.” Exciting yet unprecedented – the kind of tumult that attracts historians and wrecks careers.

As we start to wrap up, his forehead glints in the heat of the room – the kind of sweating that is less nerves and more the simple physical reality of a wide-ranging conversation, post-event, post-beer. He looks, for a moment, like a man whose body remembers what his mind has tried to rationalise.

The most convenient story about Kwasi Kwarteng is that he was a reckless Chancellor who learned nothing. The more interesting story I gleaned from our conversation is that he learned too much about how power actually works, and came away convinced that Britain’s problem is not only bad decisions, but a system that makes decisive government harder, riskier, and more fragile than voters imagine.

I finish with an obvious question. Was it a mistake being Liz Truss’ Chancellor? He doesn’t hesitate. “Even if it lasted two days, I would do it again.”