I regularly listen to podcasts: on a walk, in the car, and The Rest is Politics is a particular favourite. I’ve read some of the dairies from the Tony Blair years by Alastair Campbell, the real-life motivation behind The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker, the cussy spin doctor of Whitehall. As co-host, I like Campbell’s style, his brand of hard-knock, street-fighting politics with a sense of honour and just-below-the-surface romanticism about politics as public service.
His co-host, Rory Stewart, is a very different sort of character; despite living in the UK, I was only vaguely aware of “Rory the Tory”. He’d been a minister in various portfolios — environment, prisons, international development — under the revolving door of British Tory PMs this past decade, and I knew he’d run a Quixotic campaign for mayor of London. He comes from a privileged background, with a soft-spoken earnestness that’s almost Pollyannaish at times.
He recently published a bestseller, Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within, which I read on a dock this summer. It’s a memoir about how an upper-class, well-intended Mr Smith went to Whitehall — and hated the place.
Canadian political observers will notice the cameos from Michael Ignatieff, who appears like a father-figure during Stewart’s consideration of standing for Parliament under David Cameron. He tells Stewart at Harvard that politics isn’t like academia; it’s about taking action, not being clever: “Politics demands more of your mind, of your soul, of your emotions than anything on earth…The public isn’t interested in how clever you are. They are not interested in your thinking; they want to know where you stand.”
Moreover, he offers sensible advice to “earn your support one handshake at a time” and suggests “there can only be one answer” to the question of why anyone would want to serve, explaining, “What you say, what you always say, is that you want to make a difference. People want to hear you say that you are in it for them.”
With this advice in mind, Stewart seeks a constituency, landing on Penrith and the Borders, a safe Conservative seat between the Lake District and Scotland. A New Yorker profile from the time shows the Oxford-educated, former diplomat, author and intellectual learning how to relate to his very rural constituents, salt-of-the-earth, longstanding residents Stewart comes to admire, but also describes as the kind of rural people who still tie up their trousers with “bits of twine”, a disparaging phrase that undermines his grassroots efforts to ingratiate himself with the community.
Stewart gets off to a rocky start in party politics, first telling Cameron that he’d like some assurances of being a minister, to which Cameron rightly admonishes the upstart candidate that being a backbencher is honour enough. Stewart grudgingly agrees, recalling Sir Winston Churchill said, “‘MP’ were the proudest letters that anyone could carry after their name”.
His rocky start continues in Parliament, with his slightly bizarre goody-two-shoes, schoolboy shtick irritating veteran MPs. He interrupts one MP to ask how his speech was “relevant” to the debate at hand, as if thinking that pedantically calling a colleague out would somehow ingratiate himself.
From this inauspicious start, Stewart dedicates himself to serving his own constituency. He shares advice from his father, himself a former diplomat (if not spook), to become the “district commissioner for Cumbria”. Stewart throws himself into local infrastructure projects, particularly expanding broadband, bringing all the powers of the postnominals at the end of his name to fighting for his constituents.
As any elected official, myself included, can relate, Stewart finds “The work I was doing on community projects seemed uniquely significant: the only authentic element in the political pantomime…I owed constituents an absolute duty of care, and a relationship of trust and confidentiality, and that as a constituency MP, I might have a place as meaningful as that of a doctor or even a priest.”
He, similarly, shares the reflection of veteran MP, Ken Clarke, who recalls that “When I joined…there were Knights of the Shire, who were quite happy being backbenchers all their lives, who viewed it as a dignified part-time job and rather looked down on ministers.”
After rebelling against the government on a critical vote, Stewart is threatened that he will never become a minister in his first term. But after reelection, he adjusts himself to fit into Cameron’s adage that there are “team players” and “wankers” and concludes that he will follow the PM’s advice not to be a “wanker”. Or, as another veteran MP, David Willetts, remarks: “you need to demonstrate more public loyalty. It’s a Mephistophelian bargain, loyalty in exchange for promotion.” Similarly, Ignatieff implores Stewart that “Politics is a team sport that requires loyalty and punishes cleverness”.
As a junior minister, he’s paired with Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, and laments their shambolic approach to leadership. Truss is constantly looking for news tidbits, telling Stewart to cut national parks by an arbitrary amount, then relenting that he doesn’t have to after all — “just for you, Rory” — when Stewart objects. Johnson tells everyone what they want to hear, meaning the civil service assumes they don’t need to act on his instructions. Still, Stewart feels he is starting to make some contributions: he bans plastic bags, and makes some of the foreign-aid changes he felt were needed as a diplomat and nonprofit executive working in Afghanistan.
Yet, he struggles to work the system. It’s as if he simply cannot get the civil service onside. One wonders how much of this is an institutional failure and how much it is the personalities: his two senior ministers, after all, went on to become two of the worst, and shortest-lived, PMs of the modern era. But Stewart himself seems pedantic and too much of a Boy Scout (he concedes at one point in the book that he is “over-earnest”). It’s like the politics of politics were alien to him; he seems to struggle with quid pro quo, persuasion, flattery and a little bit of an I-owe-you approach. He tries to out-know the civil services, rather than to persuade them, or, failing that, to browbeat them.
Indeed, he outlines how one civil servant “felt that all ministers — including me — were a necessary evil: people whom she had to serve, but whom she was not required to respect. And if I viewed myself as the CEO…she, and many of her colleagues, preferred to see me simply as a parliamentary spokesman.” He comes to believe “Any civil servant had to accept ministers changing the law, or cutting budgets, but they didn’t want a minister involved in operations. They were even happy in theory with the minister setting the destination, but they wanted the routines of the ship of state, its trim and daily navigation, to be controlled by civil servants alone.” He himself describes his role as “less of a chief executive and more of a press spokesman, a coffee-server, a source of money, and a mascot.”
Eventually, however, he learns how to start to bend the system to his will, writing, “The secret, it seemed, had not been to try to argue about a particular policy, still less to match my knowledge…against the advice of civil servants. Instead we had concentrated on changing structures…[which] once approved, assumed an influence that all my previous initiatives had lacked.”
When he becomes prisons minister, he focuses on getting the basics right, including a broken-window theory approach to quite literally fix broken windows and clean up garbage in the yard in order to boost morale and instill a greater sense of standards.
To get a recalcitrant civil service onside, he learns the basics of politics: “Harness the media; the public; and sound bites; create a momentum and urgency which didn’t exist inside the department and, by embracing the bewitching, flimsy, uncertain potentials of modern politics, make them see me as a leader. Above all I needed a deadline which people would take seriously.”
As the wheels start to fall off the British Tory Party post-Brexit, he runs against Johnson and is horrified to find “perhaps an actor was what I and all the other candidates were becoming”. Yet, his earnest use of social media and attempt at a straight-talking approach — “A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality” — results in his campaign briefly catching lightning in a bottle, becoming a serious challenger to Johnson. When he loses that race, he resigns from cabinet rather than serve the new PM who he believes to be a charlatan; he’s eventually booted from the Tory caucus for voting against a hard Brexit.
Stewart’s memoir paints a picture of a broken system, where the civil service resents the ministers they serve, who are often contemptible figures anyway. How much of this is due to the unique failures of some of the flawed individuals who formed the cast of the last fourteen years of failed Conservative governments in the UK, and how much is a systemic failure? I suppose that’s the question Keir Starmer and his new Labour government will have to sort out for themselves.
Stewart, for his part, tries to sum up his approach, and the lessons learnt, even if he never quite reckons with whether his own naïveté and over-earnestness harmed his efficacy. He suggests that in politics, “True courage was not the opposite of cowardice, but the golden mean, between cowardice and foolhardiness…Courage in government was not about marching, line abreast, into the guns. And nor was it about sitting still. It was about moving thoughtfully and skillfully, employing hedgerows and covering fire, and reaching the objective intact.”
Fitting words for a former soldier. One also gets the sense reading the memoir that, however much he hated his experience in Parliament over the past decade, he isn’t truly finished with it. Is his podcasting a temporary perch?
He concludes with something of an indictment of politics as practiced in the fourteen years of Tory rule: “What is going wrong in Britain is much more basic. It’s not so much about what we do but how we do it. Getting on with it. Or maybe, in fact, it’s about what we don’t do? Not making unrealistic promises that can’t be kept…That’s part of why the public is sick of us.”
