The Guardian view on Kwasi Kwarteng: better at making enemies than forging policy
Ever since he was a boy, Kwasi Kwarteng has shown rare skill in wrongfooting opponents. At an interview for a place at Cambridge University, the Etonian heard the tutor confess that this was his first time interviewing entrance candidates. “Don’t worry, sir,” beamed Master Kwarteng. “You did fine.” The cheek paid off. He got in.
After only one week as chancellor, he is now trying a similar strategy against the Labour opposition. In his sights is what he dubs “the same old economic managerialism”, as practised by the Treasury and the Bank of England. While praising his new department as an excellent finance ministry, good at keeping a lid on the deficit, he has instructed staff that their entire focus must “be on growth”.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves can be forgiven some confusion. Isn’t this their language? Ever since John Maynard Keynes criticised “the Treasury view” and its focus on penny-pinching over growing the economy, those on the left have had in their sights those institutions that set economic policy. It was why Harold Wilson put George Brown in charge of a giant new Department for Economic Affairs to circumvent No 11’s influence. And why, in 1995, the then economics editor of the Guardian, Will Hutton, declared in The State We’re In that “reform of the Treasury is one pivot on which national renewal hangs”. It was also the focus of Jeremy Corbyn’s “institutional turn”.
Mr Kwarteng is no Corbynite, nor indeed has he previously evinced much worry about the mindset of the mandarins at Horse Guards Parade. In his maiden speech of 2010, the new MP for Spelthorne blasted Labour for some imagined profligacy while in government. His economic thinking, so far as he ever expressed any, has been rather a rum mixture of
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