Kwasi Kwarteng will reveal details of a new mini-budget today in a bid to ease soaring costs of living. The newly appointed chancellor is expected to announce tens of billions of pounds of increased spending and tax cuts in what is being billed as the biggest tax giveaway in 30 years.
As the minister tasked with shaping how the UK government spends money - and therefore how much it helps those hardest hit by the cost crisis - Cambridge graduate Kwarteng is likely to have a huge role in the coming months.
Ahead of Friday morning's big announcement, we've put together a list of things you might not know about the chancellor.
Read more: Live updates as new Chancellor reveals mini-budget being described as biggest tax giveaway in 30 years
His education was typically elite
As roads into power go, Kwarteng's is hardly unusual for a politician these days. Like many MPs, he studied at Eton College and the University of Cambridge, two of the UK's most elite institutions. At Eton, he was a King's Scholar and was awarded the prestigious Newcastle Scholarship prize. He read classics and history at Trinity College, Cambridge, achieving a first in both and twice winning the Browne Medal.
If that wasn't enough, he also attended Harvard University on a Kennedy Scholarship and has a PhD in economic history from the University of Cambridge.
He is the UK's first Black chancellor
Born in London in 1975 to Ghanaian parents who had emigrated to the UK as students in the 1960s, the 47-year-old has broken new ground in becoming the first Black person to hold the role of chancellor. His father was an economist and his mother a lawyer who reportedly admired former prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
He's had some interesting views on climate change
As business secretary, Kwarteng has been vocal about Britain's need to tackle climate change - but his views on that over time have been less than straightforward. While working as a columnist for the Telegraph - a role also once held by Boris Johnson - after graduating, Kwarteng labelled global warming as an example of "conjecture" dressed up as “granite fact”. While he has stressed the importance of intervening in the crisis in his time in office, he came under fire in July this year after he missed a meeting on moving away from fossil fuels the day after the UK recorded its hottest ever temperature.
Earlier this year Kwarteng was asked about the UK's dependency on oil and gas. He responded on Twitter saying: “Shout and scream all you like, but I’m not going to put Britain’s energy security at risk by shutting off domestic oil and gas production”. He went he added that we would need to burn oil and gas “for decades to come”.
He swore while appearing on a live game show
Arguably Kwarteng's first moment in the limelight came while he was at Cambridge, when he appeared on long-running TV game show University Challenge in 1995 aged just 19. Asked a question by host Jeremy Paxman, he buzzed to answer before exclaiming: "Oh f***, I've forgotten". After a few more seconds' thought he again said "Oh f***". The appearance made tabloid headlines but Kwarteng was not to be deterred - his team from Trinity College went on to be crowned champions of University Challenge that year.
He once said going to university would be a 'waste of time'
Despite being quite well-schooled himself, Kwarteng has not always held education in high esteem. According to the Telegraph, he is reported to have once written that going to university was a "waste of time" for those wishing to make lots of money. "If one’s sole object in life were to make as much money as possible, a university education would clearly be a waste of time," he said, adding that "it’s no use telling an employer that one is eminently qualified for a job without some proof, some scrap of paper which conveys a magical authority.”
He co-authored a now infamous book
Along with his new prime minister Liz Truss, Kwarteng is one of the authors of the now-notorious book Britannia Unchained with Dominic Raab and Priti Patel ten years ago. A book which caused controversy for its Euroscepticism, one passage said: "The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music."
He once raged against lads' mags
Another notable bugbear of the new chancellor, apparently, was racy lads' magazines. In an August 1997 column titled 'The full cost of the nipple count' Kwarteng railed against the likes of Nuts, Zoo and FHM, whose popularity he said indicated that the “common man” was now dictating national tastes. Decrying the "demand for smut" in the 1990s, he said: “Vulgarity, in the sense of the lowest common denominator, is the necessary outcome [of that process]”.
He supported Leave during Brexit
During the Brexit referendum Kwarteng, once viewed as a rising start of the right of his party, came out in support of the Leave campaign, his stance much clearer than that of Truss, who was more ambiguous about her position on the issue at the time. Now, as chancellor, he finds himself in charge of an ailing economy in a "once in a lifetime" cost-of-living crisis.
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