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Kwarteng vs Estate Agents? “No one would do that”

It was one of the more startling claims made over the weekend in the wake of the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng. Someone in an estate agent in the then chancellor’s constituency reportedly made an “obscene gesture” at him through the window in apparent disgust at the way his mini-budget had tanked the economy.

None of the three estate agents on Shepperton High Street in Surrey will admit that someone in their office was responsible for the alleged gesture towards their local MP when he toured local businesses shortly before he was sacked last week.

But all of them say they are glad he was removed as chancellor on Friday after his mini-budget sent interest rates soaring, raised mortgage costs for prospective buyers and threw the housing market – and the wider economy – into turmoil.

“He obviously made a right mess of it,” said Mike Bazely, the director of Bazely & Co estate agents he founded in 2006. “Personally, I am glad he’s out – I just don’t think he was up to it.”

Kwarteng, 47, has been MP for Spelthorne, which stretches from the perimeter of Heathrow airport in the north to the edge of Walton-on-Thames in the south, since 2010. At the last general election in 2019, he had a majority of more than 18,000.

That previously safe seat is now looking precarious, with an opinion poll over the weekend suggesting that Kwarteng’s seat is now on a knife edge, with 37% support for the Conservatives compared with 36% for Labour.

On Friday, after only 38 days, Kwarteng’s tenure as chancellor abruptly stopped when he was replaced by the former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt. On Monday, Hunt scrapped virtually all the tax cuts that Kwarteng had announced only three weeks earlier in his mini-budget, soothing markets, easing pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates as aggressively and burying what remained of his predecessor’s reputation.

Days before his dash back and forth across the Atlantic last week for the International Monetary Fund annual meeting, Kwarteng’s staff had taken him on a walkabout Shepperton’s high street to meet local businesses.

The reception was far from universally popular. Crowds are said to have formed, shouting questions at Kwarteng outside a BP petrol station and then later near a popular bakery, Jamz Cafe. The tone lowered further when Kwarteng waved at people through an estate agent’s window, with an occupant in one said to have responded with a “rude gesture”, according to sources in Kwarteng’s constituency office.

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