Rory Stewart gives disenchanted account of UK politics in new book

When he first became MP for Penrith and the Border, he decided to walk the length and breadth of his new constituency. He's honest enough to admit that he scarcely met a single constituent in the process.

Later, when attempting to become leader of the party, he made walking about and meeting the British public the hallmark of his campaign. Boris Johnson, the eventual victor, used the opposite tactic of almost complete invisibility.

Picture worth a thousand words

Given Stewart's penchant for peregrinations, it's hardly surprising that the cover of his book shows him striding boldly across a rather alarming gap. The action looks both perilous and uncomfortable; he's essentially doing the splits. One is bound to wonder, could he not have found an easier route?

From the picture's background it would appear that the author is in a rural landscape, far from the corridors of power. The book gives a measure of just how far.

Indeed, perhaps the syntax of the book's title is wrong. A better word order would have been On the Edge of Politics, because from his exile to the back benches for failing to support the government on reform of the House of Lords, to a TV debate with the other contenders for the job of Prime Minister, Rory seems doomed to a peripheral role.

His repeated complaint is that no one is taking the task of government seriously enough. It's a persuasive argument, given the string of clownish individuals that have filled successive cabinets. If anything, he's preaching to the converted. These days, the British government is so regularly associated with out-of-touch buffoonery and fiasco that the British electorate has little or no need of further evidence. 

Is mere lack of seriousness the point though? The question I found myself asking Rory Stewart, over and over again, was very simple: "What possessed you to have anything to do with these people in the first place?"

I mean, they are clearly not his kind of people. Events conspire to prove this to Rory with a frequency that becomes comical. As a result, he begins to look like some latter-day Candide. No calamity or unpleasant personality can shake his fundamental optimism about human nature.

How we laughed...

Thus, when he asks George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, why the party is not leading on the environment, the reply is, "Because we are the Conservative party." Candide writes:

'He was, I hoped, joking. But there was certainly never any money from the Treasury.'

Osborne's cynicism is matched by the affluent guests at a posh soirée in Chelsea. One of them leans across the table and asks Rory why he became a Conservative:

'I said I believed in love of country, respect for tradition, prudence at home, restraint abroad. The table laughed. Was I then a defender of the dukes and the Anglican Church, worse too of the BBC and, though people were too polite to say it, Europe? I went home early.'

…and laughed

Then there is David Cameron, the man who once declared that he'd set his mind on becoming Prime Minister because he thought he might be good at it. Despite Rory's attendance at the same school as Cameron – namely Eaton – he is treated with condescending terseness.

Cameron never allows Rory into his inner circle of old Etonians, and the man from Cumbria's only revenge is to compare Parliament to a 'boarding school, stripped by scarlet fever of most of the responsible adults and all of the nicer and kinder pupils.' His fellow Etonians, we are told, lack a sense of duty or honour. The surprise is that anyone could be naïve enough to think such a sense was ever there.

…and laughed

More insults and condescension follow. At the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, where Rory is made under-secretary to Liz Truss, his new boss is 'startlingly rude,' openly mocking his 'antique prejudices' and lack of ambition. She displays a weird lack of basic human feeling when, on learning that his father has just died, she fails to come up with a single word of condolence. Instead, she asks him if a report is ready.

…and laughed.

Meeting with Boris

Finally, there is Boris Johnson, another product of Eton, who gives Rory the job of dealing with Africa when his area of expertise is the Middle East and Asia.

The book unerringly captures the Johnsonian boosterism. At one point, by way of encouragement, Boris tells Rory to 'go forth and multiply!' The Foreign Secretary's persistent emphasis is on the importance of morale, a fact he claims to have learnt as captain of a rugby team. Rory suspects he is seen by Boris as one more in a line of 'prim pedantic figures' who disapproved of him: housemasters, dons, editors.

Stewart recalls meeting Boris for the first time in, of all places, Iraq. The scene is fittingly reminiscent of the days of empire. This fine passage manages to capture the mix of jingoism, levity, and utter make-believe that Johnson so often articulated:

'He had described (in the Spectator) the British military in Iraq as both a charade and a triumph, as though he was watching not a trillion-dollar occupation, but the Life Guards in their polished breast plates, trotting down the Mall. His mock-heroic nostalgia had managed to be both self-satisfied and self-deprecating. Scenes that seemed to demand the prose of the First World War were presented in the tone of the Owl and the Pussycat.'

None of this kind of thing, presumably, would be in the book if Rory Stewart hadn't noticed how obnoxious his fellow Tories could be. The insight that eludes him, however, is that they are like this for a reason.

To read this book is to be expected to believe that government has fallen into a state of disrepair. Like the palace of Westminster itself, it is in terminal decline. With this decline comes the lack of seriousness. It never seems to occur to the author that this decline might be an inevitable result of his party's ideology.

The real question, then, is why did Rory Stewart land up in the wrong party?

After all, we know from his own account that he began as a member of the Labour party. Are love of country, a belief in prudence at home and restraint abroad, sufficient reasons for throwing one's lot in with the bad boys? Not really, but perhaps Eaton had blinded him to just how bad these boys were.

If the author doesn't quite twig that he's fallen in with the wrong bunch, the backlash from that bunch when he runs for top job demonstrates that, in contrast to him, they know their enemy very well. The Spectator, once edited by Johnson, finds his earnest ideas on British life 'fey and eccentric.' The Telegraph – sometimes known as the 'Torygraph' – ridicules his ideas on Brexit, comparing them to Conan Doyle's touching belief in the Cottingley Fairies.

One of the Cottingley fairies

Rory's cover is blown. The chap is not just away with the fairies. Frankly, he's nothing less than a fifth columnist and a Remainer to boot. In short, the kind who deserves to be blackballed at the Carlton Club.

All of this helps one recall that certain things about Britain never change. According to One Fine Day, a new book by Matthew Parker, the 29th of September 2023 will mark precisely a hundred years since the apogee of the British Empire. Back then, the government was Tory, led by Stanley Baldwin.

When the Palestine mandate came into force, the empire reached its largest square mileage. It would never be bigger. From the point of view of Baldwin, who was accused of failing to rearm the country before the outbreak of the Second World War, it would all be downhill from here.

Waugh: A genuinely bright young thing

That same period of the Twenties was also the setting for Evelyn Waugh's satire of the ruling classes – or rather, of their sons and daughters. 'Bright young things' was their nickname at the time. Waugh preferred the description enshrined in his novel's title: Vile Bodies.

There is nothing serious about these less than bright young things.

Early in the story, after a fancy-dress party is reduced to the 'hard kernel of gaiety that never breaks' at around three in the morning, the more committed revellers set off in taxis to find another venue.

They arrive eventually at a mystery address where one of their number lives and use up all the eggs cooking a late supper. It is only the next day that anyone realises the address is No. 10 Downing Street.

Journalists arrive in time to see one bright young female exit by the front door dressed in a skimpy Hawaiian costume. The scandal of so wild a frolic in Downing Street is enough to bring down the government. After all, it was no jolly jape running the largest empire the world had ever seen.

It's immediately obvious that no such shenanigans could bring down an administration now. Even in the unlikely event of a ban on parties throughout the rest of the country, a Prime Minister could survive for months simply by referring to a wild party in Downing Street as a 'work gathering'.

These are not the Roaring Twenties so much as the Roaring with Laughter Twenties.

In fact, governing is so full of fun that Cameron left the job of Prime minister humming a jolly tune. He had just lost a referendum to stay in the European Union, but hey, who hasn't spilt some milk in their time? 

Affronted lament

Given the book's disgust with this contemporary lack of seriousness, it's hardly surprising that Politics On the Edge is a bit short on laughs. Instead, we get regular passages of affronted lament over the inanity of Stewart's Conservative colleagues in parliament.

But what the author stubbornly fails to see is the ideological purpose behind such a casual, lazy attitude to the needs of the country. It really is as if it never occurs to him that what one might euphemistically call a 'laissez-faire' approach has great merit, if the only segment of society you serve – i.e., the very rich – are its beneficiaries.

Like the well-meaning, hard-working, serially disappointed Candide that he is, Rory becomes desperate 'to vindicate the years I had ploughed into this rebarbative profession,' yet he never quite digests the crucial lesson his political life is teaching him.

It's true, he quits the party after his failure to lead it, but why was he ever there? Yes, it's a shambles. Yes, the brains of Tory politicians, and even some of those in the other parties, are like mobile phones, 'flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness.'

It's obvious these people are not qualified to govern. So why is the party the most successful electorally in the whole of European history?

Because, as any Conservative Dr Pangloss will tell you, this is the best of all possible worlds.