By Bagehot

KWASI Kwarteng, elected in 2010 as the Conservative MP for the safe seat of Spelthorne, is by common consent a rising star of the right. His CV bears academic distinctions in the same way that a Russian general’s chest bears medals: scholar at Eton, good degree then a history PhD at Cambridge, Kennedy scholar at Harvard, even a place on the college team that won University Challenge, a brainy television show. He has positioned himself on the crunchy right of the new intake, and is co-editing a book to come out soon setting out a new vision for the right, with a title that amounts to the slapping down of a gauntlet, “After the Coalition”. The left of centre Observer, in a very friendly profile, notes that he is tipped to be the “first black Tory cabinet minister”, a tiresome millstone of a prediction that must dismay as much as it cheers, I’d have thought.