Rory
Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge has been a huge hit. Should you
read it? What does it tell us about British politics? And what should we make of Stewart
himself?
Rory Stewart is now 51. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a soldier
(briefly), diplomat, and adventurer, and lectured at both Harvard and Yale. Then
in 2010 he was elected as Tory MP for a large, beautiful rural seat, Penrith
and the Borders. He looked forward to progressing to a ministerial role and
eventually a Cabinet seat.
But this was where things started to go wrong.
It’s all
described in Politics on the Edge (Jonathan Cape, 2023), published in
the US as How Not to be a Politician. In it, Stewart describes the
horrible life of a backbench MP, the authoritarian party whipping, the mad way
ministers are appointed, and the steamy horrors of the Brexit period – from
which he emerged with honour, but with his political career in tatters.
The reviews
for Politics on the Edge have been excellent. Writing in The Guardian,
former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson compared it to “Orwell down the coal
mine, Swift on religious excess. We should be grateful it was written.” In the
US, Andrew Moravcsik in Foreign Affairs called it “the poignant tale of
a genuinely decent human being …and …the revelation that the political
hypocrisy and ignorance surrounding him will thwart his efforts.” The book
quickly hit the No. 1 spot in the Sunday Times bestseller list; it’s now
out in paperback and is still at No. 3 in Amazon UK’s non-fiction charts after
eight months.
It's helped that Stewart’s had a high profile since he left Parliament; The Rest is Politics, the politics podcast he co-presents with
Alastair Campbell, has been very popular (and has been said, by Nick Duerden in The
i, to net him £70,000 a month). And
Stewart is a frequent interviewee on TV, radio and the net; the more so since
the book; in fact he has spread across the media like Japanese knotweed.
But the
fact that critics think it a good book does not make it one. Is it?
The short
answer is yes, absolutely; anyone who cares about the way Britain is run should
read it. It is also well-written and engaging. But at times it did irritate,
even anger, me. And it raises too many questions it doesn’t answer.
The
honourable gentleman
At the
start of the book, Stewart says he wanted to enter politics as a Conservative because
he wanted to make a difference. (Everyone who’s been in politics says they
wanted to ‘make a difference’.) He decides the best way to find a seat is to go
and see the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron. Told that Cameron will
give him a short appointment, he flies back to Britain. He does meet Cameron,
who is not encouraging. He finds a seat anyway, in the Border country. A few
months later, he wins it in the 2010 General Election. It’s a safe Tory seat.
But his enthusiasm for the Borders and the people seems very real, and he
explores the constituency on foot, in winter.
Stewart’s
introduction to Parliament, however, is jarring. It starts with the new intake
being summoned to a meeting with the Chief Whip, who tells them they are lobby
fodder and their job is to shut up and vote the way they are told. They might
be called legislators, says the Chief Whip, but they shouldn’t regard debates
as occasions for open discussion, and “are not intended to overly scrutinise
legislation”. Although Stewart doesn’t say so, this is surely a contempt of
Parliament. As the term progresses, Stewart feels increasingly tainted by the
tawdry hypocrisies of life at Westminster; the craven text messages one sends
to the PM to congratulate him on a speech, or to support a colleague who has
been caught with their pants down. “We attended award ceremonies hosted by MPs
who had been suspended for corruption; some continued to drink with MPs
accused, and later convicted, of assault and rape.” He does like some of his
fellow-MPs, but friendship is rare – and not without reason: “Too many of our
private conversations seemed to get back to Number 10 and the whips.”
He is under
pressure to vote for things he thinks are wrong. In particular, Cameron wants
MPs to vote for initial legislation on Lords reform, something he doesn’t want
himself but has promised his LibDem coalition partners. Stewart, deeply
conservative with a small C, is against it. I think he was wrong about that. But
he’s horribly right about something else – Afghanistan; Stewart knows the
country and sees that the West’s nation-building efforts are deeply unwise,
that you cannot tell a people what to be. This cuts no ice with Cameron. But
Stewart will eventually be vindicated. He has since argued (in the influential
American journal Foreign Affairs) that the West might have achieved more
had it tried to do less. From my own experience (not in Afghanistan but elsewhere),
I agree.
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Border country: Stewart's constituency,
Penrith and the Borders
|
Stewart
quickly realises that as a backbench MP he has no agency. But for a long time
he isn’t offered a ministerial post, even a PPS, because Cameron does not like
him. After the 2015 election, however, Cameron does give him a junior
ministerial position at the Department of the Environment, working under Liz
Truss. It is a frustrating experience. He finds it hard to get anything done.
He also finds Truss asking him for a 25-year plan for the environment, insisting
it be ready in a few days. He then finds she has quietly given the task to
several other people as well. So they combine their drafts –which doesn’t please
her. He finds Truss is interested in no-one’s view but her own, and has a brain
that transmits, albeit erratically, but does not receive. Reading this, one is
appalled that she ever held ministerial office at all, let alone the
Premiership.
Later,
under Theresa May, Stewart becomes the Minister of State at the Department for
International Development (DfID) – later rising to Secretary of State for
International Development and a Cabinet seat. This is appropriate, as unlike
other MPs he has hands-on experience in development, in Afghanistan; but he
finds the job frustrating and the civil servants obstructive. In between these
two development posts he serves as Prisons Minister. Here he begins
improvements to security and discipline and also renationalises the Probation
Service, the privatisation of which was clearly a blunder. These steps are
taken with support from his boss, Justice Minister and Lord Chancellor David
Gauke. Stewart has praise for very few senior politicians but he does for Gauke
(and for May herself, who he served loyally to the end). Still, Stewart finds
ministerial office frustrating, and thinks the way ministers are moved around
is arbitrary, frequent and not conducive to good government. I’m sure he’s
right.
Posh boy
makes good?
But there were
moments in this book when Stewart did piss me off. Early on he goes to see
Cameron and notes that the Tory leader is surrounded by floppy-haired old
Etonians – but what the hell does he think he is? I can’t condemn
Stewart for being born posh (besides, I went to the same school as him till age
13). But he can lack self-awareness. I also questioned his judgments about
international development. This was my own field for many years. He has genuine
experience of it from Afghanistan, but it is deep rather than broad and while I
agree with some of his views, others seem sweeping. If, as he says, he had
problems with his civil servants at DFiD, this may be why. (He also recently angered
me with a slighting reference on his podcast to VSO, the British equivalent of
the Peace Corps; I was a volunteer for five years.)
Moreover there
is austerity – which Stewart, as a Tory MP, supported. I was struck by a
recent New Yorker piece by Sam Knight (What Have Fourteen Years of
Conservative Rule Done to Britain?, March 25 2024). “Between 2010 and 2018,
funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter,” he says, “Officers
stopped investigating burglaries. …Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had
to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction
budget had been cut by 46% between 2009 and 2022.” There is much more of this
in the piece. No doubt Stewart, and other Tories from the time, would argue
that the huge debts incurred in the 2008 bailout had given them little option.
But this is also about who was made to pay the price. “Poorer
communities [that vote Labour] …suffered disproportionately,” says Knight. “In
Liverpool …spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country.
Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in
England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent
county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories.” In short, the rich brought down the system and
the poor then picked up the bill. Stewart, and every other Tory MP of the time, was complicit
in this.
In fact it would be easy to dismiss Politics on the Edge as a
self-justificatory memoir by yet another posh boy who somehow thinks he has
succeeded on merit. (Russell
Barnes in Civil Service World described it as “400-odd pages of how
right Rory Stewart was at the time, and how history will prove him to be a
visionary.”)
But that would be a pity, because this memoir really does
lift the lid on Parliament and government. Other books have done this before
(Caroline Lucas’s Honourable Friends; Roy Hattersley’s witty Who Goes
Home; Martin Bell’s An Accidental MP; and many more). But for a
vision of sheer dysfunction, few accounts beat this one. No-one can read this
book and continue to believe that Britain is a fully functional democracy.
Moreover Stewart has earned a
hearing. Unlike other posh boys (like Cameron), he didn’t swan out of Oxford
into a job as a research assistant then progress smoothly into Parliament, rising
without trace. He did a lot with his life before politics. His army service was
brief, but he then spent some years as a diplomat, serving in Indonesia and
later as British Representative in Montenegro. He also founded, and for three years ran, an
NGO in Afghanistan, where he met his American wife, Shoshana. He has written a
number of books, including The Prince of the Marshes (now relaunched as Occupational
Hazards), in which he describes his stretch as deputy governor of an Iraqi
province in the wake of the 2003 invasion. In 2000 he took leave from
the Foreign Office to make an epic 18-month walk across Asia; The Places In
Between (which is excellent) describes the Afghan section, but he has
written little of the journey otherwise, and is sometimes said to have been a
spy. This is a bit idle; of course he will have passed any useful information
to the intelligence services – he was a serving diplomat. But it’s true he may
have had much closer links with them; after all, his father Brian Stewart was a
very senior spook. And in general, he’s less David Cameron, more Fitzroy
Maclean – a man whose life and background were very like his own.
 |
Stewart as a Foreign Office minister, at a conference on
endangered species in 2018 (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) |
Beware
the slithy Gove, my son
It’s also
clear that Stewart cared about his ministerial briefs. But the Brexit-related
chaos in 2016-2019 meant Ministers were shuffled around even more often than
usual. Stewart held his junior ministerial posts for little more than a year at
most, and his Cabinet post for less than three months. For some Ministers, every
reshuffle will have been a career opportunity. But Stewart feels, rightly, that
this was no way to run a country. You also sense his disgust at the tawdriness
of some of his ‘colleagues’ (I wish Tories would not use that word). In
particular, the duplicity of Michael Gove was breathtaking.
In the end,
however, it’s Boris Johnson who emerges as the villain of this book. And
Stewart confronts him. First he stands against him in the 2019 leadership
contest; he was the only One Nation Tory to dare do so – and only because none
of the others would, by his account. He doesn’t win, although he is probably
the candidate best liked by voters as a whole. Then in September he is one of
21 Tory MPs, many of them former Cabinet ministers, who have the whip removed
for voting against Johnson’s government on a Brexit-related motion. Some of the
MPs later had the whip restored, but Stewart decides to resign from the
Conservative Party altogether. He could contest his seat as an independent in
the December election, but doesn’t; he may have felt he would not win, but in Politics
on the Edge he says he didn’t want to campaign against people who once
campaigned for him. If that was his reason, it was a decent one. Politics on
the Edge ends there.
It has sold
very well and must have earned Stewart a pretty penny. I can’t begrudge
him that. Other senior Tories rolled over and played along with Boris Johnson
although they knew perfectly well what sort of man he was. Stewart, at some
personal cost, did not. Moreover he is an interesting man who has packed a lot
into his 51 years. And Politics on the Edge is a good book –
well-written, forthright, revealing and important.
But there is something
missing from the book: analysis. Stewart is
an old-style conservative with a love of tradition and an innate distrust of
too much change. This traditional style of British conservatism has deep roots, going right back to the French Revolution and the events that followed. It is not unreasonable. After all, since then radical utopians
have likely killed at least as many people as conservatives. Yet change is needed. Britain’s
government and parliament, as seen in Politics on the Edge, are sclerotic
and in a way corrupt. And we’ve just had an election in which a party
won one of the largest majorities in history with just 33.7% of the vote share –
and that’s only of the votes cast; 40% of voters didn’t bother voting at all. This
has been followed by serious civil disorder. If this had happened in some hapless African republic the Foreign Secretary would be wagging their finger at them and muttering about suspension from the Commonwealth. But we cannot see what is happening to us.
Britain’s system is rotten and has
run its course, at least in its present form. That is clear from the book; but at no point does
Stewart really confront the implications or say how we should address
it. I think he
should have done. Politics on the Edge is one of the best political
memoirs I have read and I strongly recommend it. But in that sense, at least,
there is a void at its heart.
Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now
available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.
