Politics on the Edge

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.

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.

Don't like anchovies? Don't bother voting, then

There is more than one threat to democracy in Britain, but the worst is an electoral system that seems set up to sabotage it

As I write this, the survival of democracy is, in most places, not a given. In Britain, a misled and angry electorate has made a decision on the EU that will certainly damage them, and others. In the US, democracy may soon elect a man who appears to care little for it. Across Europe, the far right has been empowered by racist rhetoric. 

There has been an assumption that democracy is the ultimate form of human organization. Nowhere was this assumption better embodied than in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992). But it was not a new view; the presumption in favour of democracy as the final form of government had been embedded in Western thought since 1945. The idea that democracy could not be wrong underpinned the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq. There has been an innate view that the world progresses towards democracy. But there is no such thing as automatic progress. In fact, as the English philosopher John Gray has pointed out (notably in his 2007 book Black Mass), the idea that history cannot go backwards is arrant nonsense.

Voting in the desert, 1945 (Imperial War Museum)

And there are plenty of challenges to democracy. They include rising inequality, the refugee crisis and the rise of the radical Right, social alienation and division, and the instability of the world financial system. However, democracy in Britain, and to a lesser extent the US, faces a particular danger – electoral systems that can disenfranchise their voters, distort the political agenda and permit the election of governments that do not have popular support.  Given recent events in Britain, and the nature of the US general election due in November 2016, this is a very acute question.

One man, one vote? Forget it 
First, the United States. For Presidential elections, each state sends elected representatives to an electoral college, the number of these electors being proportionate to the population of the state. However, the representatives are elected on a winner-takes-all system, so a Republican voter in a mostly Democrat state has little effect on the result. Some votes thus have far more weight than others, and it is quite easy for a President to be elected with a minority of the votes cast.

There have been a number of such cases since a popular vote became the rule in all states (in 1872). Harry S. Truman’s surprise win in 1948 was achieved with 57.1% of the vote in the electoral college, but he had received just 49.5% of the popular vote.  The most egregious case was Woodrow Wilson in 1912 (81.9% in the electoral college and just 41.8% on the ground). However, that was a long time ago, and was – unusually for the US – a four-way fight. More recently Bill Clinton scraped in twice on a minority vote, with just 43% of the popular vote the first time round. It should be noted that he did beat George H.W. Bush, who got 37.4%; the balance was taken by independent Ross Perot. However, when George W. Bush won the deeply controversial 2000 poll, rival Al Gore actually did beat him in the popular vote, by 48.4% to 47.9%. (President Obama did win the popular vote, in both 2008 and 2012.)

More seriously, these figures are of votes cast and do not reflect abstentions. Both candidates for the November 2016 US election are detested by some of those who would normally vote for their side. At the time of writing (July 2016), it is hard to know how this will affect the result, but it may be that many people will simply not vote.  This could result in a President who has won not only a minority of the votes cast, but those of an even smaller minority of the electorate.  Turnout of voting-age population in presidential elections has not reached 60% since 1968 (and has only once exceeded 55% since, in 2008). In the disputed 2000 election, it was only just over 50%. So how great a mandate does a President have when they walk into the White House, and what does it entitle them to do?

In the United States, of course, the Constitution has checks and balances, and a President has some things they cannot do; they must get their measures through a potentially hostile, and separately elected Congress. Having done so, they may then see such a law struck down if it is not in accord with the Constitution. The United Kingdom has no such safeguards. A government elected on a minority vote will have more or less untramelled power, as it requires only a majority in Parliament, nothing more; the Lords can review and delay but not prevent legislation, and the head of state, by convention, does neither. In view of this it would appear essential that the composition of Parliament reflect popular voting intentions.

But it nowhere near does. The current government received the support of 37% of the voters at the last election, and only 24% of those registered to vote. Again, the culprit is the “winner-takes-all” electoral system.  According to the UK’s Electoral Reform Society (The 2015 General Election: A Voting System in Crisis), this was “the most disproportionate result in British election history. Labour saw their vote share increase while their number of seats collapsed. The Conservatives won an overall majority on a minority of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats lost nearly all their seats – despite winning 8% of the vote. The SNP won 50% of the Scottish vote share, but 95% of Scottish seats.” The anti-EU party, UKIP, won more than one in eight of the votes cast but just one seat.

These inequities have several consequences. The first is simply that the government of the day lacks legitimacy, which makes the UK marginal for being a democracy. The second is alienation; if your vote is not going to affect the issue in the constituency where you live, why would you vote? But also, why would you feel any loyalty to the State?

Don’t like anchovies? Tough 

Inequitable voting systems hold a further threat to democracy that is more subtle, and dangerous.  A political party or a Presidential candidate now sets policy for the voters that can affect the result – that is, floating voters who live in swing states or marginal constituencies. Modern campaign managers have databases such as the Republicans’ Voter Vault (now called GOPData) and the Democrats’ Demzilla that can narrow this group down with extraordinary accuracy. As Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger explained in the LA Times some years ago: “The program allows ground-level party activists to track voters by personal hobbies, professional interests, geography — even by their favorite brands of toothpaste and soda and which gym they belong to. Both parties can identify voters by precinct, address, party affiliation and, often, their views on hot-button issues. ...Voter Vault includes far more information culled from marketing sources — including retailers, magazine subscription services, even auto dealers” (The GOP Knows You Don’t Like Anchovies, June 25 2006). Meanwhile in the UK the Conservative Party in the 2015 Election mounted a mobile “battle bus” campaign carefully targeted on marginal constituencies. How this was paid for, and by whom, is currently (July 2016) of interest to the Electoral Commission. But it worked. And in general, as Green MP Caroline Lucas points out in her recent book Honourable Friends?, campaigners target only floating voters, and have little interest in those that don’t vote, or vote the other way.

This is not just about the relative weight of votes; it distorts the issues on which an election is fought. A newspaper may have stirred up concern about (say) Syrian refugees coming to the UK, even though very few are, because it has determined this is of interest to its middle-class readers, who happen also to be the swing voters in semi-rural seats such as Upper Snodgrass or The Merkin. Your own concerns may be completely different – a dodgy hospital trust, a lack of policing; but because you are not of the CW1 demographic, are not in a marginal or do not like anchovies, you do not matter, although your concerns may be far more widespread than those of the voters who do. The election will be fought on the anchovies issue because the Daily Mail has convinced its own relatively narrow readership that it is what matters.

Moreover the voter’s choice is further limited because the electoral system in the UK and US forces parties to be much broader coalitions than they should be. A Republican voter may therefore find themselves faced with only one choice – Trump, for example. In this case, s/he will at least have had a chance to vote in the primaries. A British voter will not have had any role in choosing who their constituency candidate is, unless they are an active member of a political party. It has been this, in part, that has led to the implosion of the two main British parties following the vote to leave the EU in June 2016. There is no consensus within either party as to how to proceed, or under whose leadership. This is because both parties really need to split in two, and offer the voters a choice. Neither can afford to let that happen. A party that splits will, under a non-proportional system, simply disappear.

A choice. Demagogues? Or good government? 
However, there is a yet further danger to democracy because of the electoral system, and that is that a demagogue or mountebank with only minority support can come to power. In the US there would be some constitutional checks, though they might be subverted (Nixon, however, failed in the end to subvert them). In Britain a demagogue elected by a minority would face little opposition once in power.

It should not be argued that proportional voting would make the subversion of democracy impossible. That is clearly nonsense. Hitler came to power under a proportional system (albeit a party list system, which would not be my first choice). However, it should be noted that Hitler’s total – he won 33.09% of the votes cast in November 1932, on a turnout of about 80% - represented about 26.5% of the registered electorate. This was more than the Conservatives won in Britain in 2015, and would have carried him unchallenged into absolute power under the British system. In Germany, it at least required the (reluctant) consent of the President.

Any form of human organization must be underpinned by mechanisms that prevent its subversion, and the electoral system is of course only one of them. E.M. Forster, whose belief in democracy was qualified, commented that “no device has been found by which... private decencies can be transmitted to public affairs. As soon as people have power they go crooked...” (What I Believe, 1938). That is a cynical view, but it is true that nowadays the “devices ” are in poor condition. They include a venal media, antiquated Parliamentary procedure, the degradation of MPs to lobby fodder, the lack of an effective review chamber and an inactive Head of State. However, most of these would be of less consequence if it were not for the electoral system.

It is this that is the central threat to democracy in Britain, depriving governments of legitimacy and alienating millions from democracy. With electoral reform, many of the ills of British governance would right themselves, forcing the media to adopt a broader agenda and almost certainly leading to reform of Parliament. Without electoral reform, however, it is hard to see why people will want to defend what little democracy they have.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads