Kwasi Kwarteng, we hardly knew ye. After 38 days, the Chancellor was unceremoniously axed from his post today as Liz Truss desperately tries to rescue her crumbling premiership. Memorable highlights of his five-week stint include the mini-Budget, firing Tom Scholar and being mistaken for Bernard Mensah. Indeed, the official mourning period appears in retrospect to have been the honeymoon of his tenure.
Kwarteng and Truss were elected to parliament on the same day and have been close friends for more than a decade. They were co-authors, co-founders and successive leaders of the Free Enterprise Group, allies through the long years of May and Johnson. And yet that didn’t stop her from sacking him as her no 2 and the next-door neighbour. But one man’s downfall is another man’s opportunity and attention has already turned to Kwarteng’s successor.
And that lucky man is Jeremy Hunt, Theresa May’s onetime Foreign Secretary who backed Rishi Sunak over Liz Truss in the final round of last month’s leadership contest. Before that, of course, Hunt was himself in the running for the leader, with tax cuts top of his proposed agenda. Now Hunt is being seen as a reassuring ‘greybeard’ of the party’s ‘sensible’ wing but back in July he wanted to cancel Rishi Sunak’s planned rise in corporation tax and instead reduce the 25 per cent rate to 15 per cent.
Ironically, with Truss being forced to drop her own planned cut in corporation tax and going ahead with Sunak’s planned rise, it is Hunt who will be the beneficiary of her lack of market credibility – even though he wanted a bigger cut in the tax than she did…
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