NC for this as I knew KK for years. My old phone has his mobile on it (didn’t bother to copy it across to my current one as I was so fed up with him).
I will try to answer your question. My take is fairly similar to that of Rory Stewart who knew him at school and obvs was in Parliament at the same time - if you want to hear his view listen to the Rest is Politics podcast.
First thing to understand is KK is a bit weird. A bit of a loner, not one of the gang. Goes his own way. He never puts himself out to please other people, which is why the conspiracy theories that all this stuff is just trying to make his hedge fund mates rich and happy doesn’t stack up to me at all. At the same time, he always recognised that it you were a total outcast that wasn’t good for your future prospects, so throughout his life he’s always joined lots of all-mens clubs to give him the veneer of belonging - the Pitt at university, then the Carlton, and so we hear, more recently the Garrick and White’s.
Second thing is that he’s not actually all that wealthy - not like Rees Mogg or Rishi or even the entrepreneur types like Hunt and Shapps. Like Boris, KK was a scholarship boy at Eton. He wasn’t in banking long enough to make any serious money, the books he wrote were never bestsellers (we are not talking Jeffrey Archer thrillers here) and he was also on the backbenches for ages which doesn’t pay all that well. He was a shockingly cheap date. But unlike Boris, I have never had the feeling he was personally greedy for money - that is not what motivates him.
What REALLY motivates him is asserting his intellectual superiority. He HAS to be the cleverest person in the room, which is why Tom Scholar had to go. He is a very ideologically driven small state libertarian, who believes that taxes should be cut to make the country more attractive both to HNWs and corporations, which he believes should in turn foster growth. He not only disagrees with people who don’t share these views, but he doesn’t even want to listen to what they have to say, they are just dismissed as irrelevant because they aren’t as clever as him. He was the same about Brexit. Getting into Cabinet, and then into no11, was for him the ultimate opportunity to demonstrate his intellect (as he sees it), almost like a rematch of University Challenge. Right now, he’ll be telling himself that the bond markets and economists don’t really understand the genius of what he’s trying to do because he Kwasi has literally invented a new approach to fixing the economy that nobody else was clever enough to think of, and nobody else was bold enough to try.