Rory Stewart’s memoir reveals a man of contradictions
Rory Stewart’s memoir, “Politics on the Edge”, is a story of frustrated ambition. At times the prose is almost lyrical – and always a pleasure to read – in what is signposted as “A Memoir from Within”. Stewart was a politician with acres of personal hinterland, an almost Victorian figure in his love of countryside and enjoyment of long and strident walks across Afghanistan and Scotland and its borderlands, but above all in his seriousness.
Stewart is a man who needed a mission and found a succession of them. He brought to each a craving urgency and a strong desire to be of public service. He is also a man of contradictions. Self-deprecating but also vain, a Tory who was also a Whig, a social liberal whilst also a flag-carrier for traditional values, an old Etonian almost too embarrassed to admit it. His personal journey from soldiering via jobs overseas to near-miss Prime Minister illustrates all these contradictions; but it is the contrasts which make him interesting and his memoir stimulating as well as enjoyable.
Disarmingly Stewart admits as much in the Author’s Note at the start of the memoir:
“I have tried to be honest about my own vanity, ambitions and failures. … If I may not always have recorded what is true, I have not written what I know to be false … my final sense is one of shame … and my regret is often not about my openness but about not being able to be more forceful in my condemnation.”
He needn’t have worried. What he has written is rarely other than forceful and often plain angry. Opinions and judgements appear on almost every page, especially so after his election as an MP and his eventual ascent to ministerial office. Leading Conservatives are not spared his wrath.
Stewart was a late entrant to politics. Unlike David Cameron or George Osborne and many others, he didn’t jump straight from university into a political role as a party researcher or special adviser to thereafter become an MP and later a minister. His route was very different. Son of a colonial civil servant – who himself had risen to one of the top jobs in the Secret Intelligence Service – between Eton and Oxford, Stewart had five months in the Black Watch regiment and after graduation joined the Foreign Office. By his mid-twenties he had served in Indonesia and Montenegro. Itchy feet was already a feature. He opted to take leave from the Foreign Office to walk across South Asia from Nepal to Afghanistan and subsequently wrote a best-selling book about it. Next he became a regional administrator in southern Iraq and wrote a book about that too. Then a tour as director of a foundation in Afghanistan fostering employment in traditional arts.
By 2008, Stewart was heading to a professorship in human rights at Harvard. Restless as ever this became a launch pad into op-eds in the US press and engagement with leading US politicians, including Hilary Clinton. In little over a decade he had gained international experience and a degree of expertise. But it sprang from quite thin soil; he never seemed to stick at much for very long. Ambition always beckoned onwards and upwards.
As he writes in “Politics on the Edge”, Stewart hesitated about leaving Harvard (after just two years) and, showing his characteristic blend of diffidence and self-confidence, tested the water by calling on his fellow old Etonian and then leader of the Conservative party, David Cameron, who in 2010 was on the threshold of becoming Prime Minister. Though Cameron didn’t take to him then or later (and subsequent references to Cameron in the book are usually sour-toned) the stars were aligned in Stewart’s favour for his entry into parliament as MP for Penrith and The Border later that year. The man who had told his father he had wanted to leave academia and to “do something”, now had his chance.
Stewart clearly enjoyed his constituency work and threw himself into it. But the itchy feet searched out stepping stones to office via chairmanships of parliamentary committees obtained by playing on his overseas experience. A ministerial job was not however gained easily or quickly. It took him five years of backbench tedium before he made it. Again luck was on his side. The end of the coalition government in 2015 and resultant departure of LibDem ministers opened up new slots to be filled. Stewart was eager and ready even though the prize was on the lowest ministerial rank and in the environment ministry under an unsympathetic and poorly regarded – by him – Liz Truss. But he was in the ministerial door and he didn’t look back.
Stewart had variable success as a minister. Once again he hardly drew breath as job followed job – five in six years at my count. Revealingly only when he joined the Cabinet as international development secretary in 2019 did he seem to fully grasp how to be an effective minister. Before that he craved executive responsibility and felt constrained by civil servants who thought that execution was their job. He resented time spent in parliament and at the despatch box as a distraction which kept him from ‘doing things’. Curiously given that his expertise was in foreign affairs, he seems most proud of his time as prisons minister where his “ten prison project” delivered measurable results.
His relationships with his ministerial bosses and counterparts were mixed, too. Neither Boris Johnson or Liz Truss passed the ‘seriousness’ test; indeed both showed what was wrong with the contemporary Conservative party and parliamentary government in Britain. But David Gauke (who subsequently backed his bid to be Prime Minister) comes through in bright colours: a listener, a ‘doer’, a decent and courageous person.
And so to Brexit and its fall-out both personal and national. Stewart was a remainer who recognised a need to move on, though not at any cost. He supported Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement (and had respect for her in the process) and opposed a ’no deal’ outcome. He saw Johnson as an irresponsible and devious power-grabber. His detestation of Johnson led him in the absence of any other One Nation parliamentary colleague stepping forward to throw his hat into the ring to become Prime Minister after May resigned. Using social media cleverly, he rapidly built support in the general population and did better in opinion polling than anyone could have expected. By his account though too many Conservative MPs put their career expectations first and whether reluctantly or not backed Johnson as a likely election winner.
Stewart’s departure from parliament in 2019 – forced out by Boris Johnson’s withdrawal of the whip from him and twenty others – deprived our political life of someone who was a serious political figure. The end of his political career is recorded in pages dripping with disillusionment as well as frustration. Fortunately he is not lost from public life as he finds other ways to contribute including via a lively and popular podcast (hosted with Alastair Campbell) and engagement once more in charitable work overseas. His unusually reflective memoir is well worth a read.
Politics On the Edge by Rory Stewart, published by Jonathan Cape, £22
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