History is unlikely to be kind to Kwasi Kwarteng’s 38-day tenure as Britain’s first Black chancellor. Almost overnight, his disastrous mini-budget tanked the economy, crashed the pound and sent interest rates soaring. Three weeks later, he was gone. But there is no denying the symbolic power of the brief moment last autumn when there were no white men occupying any of the four great offices of state.
Kwarteng, who was born in east London to Ghanaian parents was the fourth consecutive person of colour to hold the post of chancellor. James Cleverly, whose mother hails from Sierra Leone, became the country’s first Black foreign secretary. Suella Braverman, the daughter of a Kenyan of Christian Goan origin and a Mauritian of Indian origin, was the third home secretary of colour in a row, while Kemi Badenoch, who was born in south-west London to Nigerian parents, became trade secretary. Perhaps most notable of all was that this new era of diversity at the top of government had been delivered not by Labour, the party traditionally seen as the natural home for minority voters, but by the Conservatives.
In the wake of the fallout from his mini-budget, Kwarteng derided the opposition’s record on diversity. “If you look at the last 10 years, the Conservative party is much more ethnically diverse than the Labour party, and they lecture us on diversity. They lecture us on gender diversity when they’ve never had a female leader; we’ve had three female prime ministers,” he told the Mail on Sunday. “So, on gender, on race, on all of these things they think they own, they are failing and are backward, and the Conservative party is much more progressive.”
