Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from within by Rory Stewart
Rory Stewart could have been a parliamentary sketchwriter. Apt similes flow from his pen. On the first page of his book, he draws the five contestants in a television debate with their legs “coyly looped over the footrest of the bar stools, like diminutive nightclub crooners”.
In the next paragraph he gives us Michael Gove, perhaps the cleverest of the debaters, with “one side of his mouth pulled up in a smirk, making him resemble a grammar-school master, presented with a comical error in Latin composition”.
And here is Boris Johnson, looking “as though he is a celebrity contestant bracing for a custard pie in the face”.
But Stewart is no mere sketchwriter. To his credit, he is down there in the arena, or in this case down there in a television studio with no live audience, competing in 2019 to become the next leader of the Conservative Party and therefore the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
And yet he is a spectator too, watching himself make a hash of the debate, with its lack of any actual people whom he might be able to enlist as allies.
He sees too the pitiful limitations of our political culture, its “lack of seriousness” and the way its practitioners develop “a capacity for shortcuts and sinuous evasions”:
“Our brains have become like the phones in our pockets: flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness, that tempt us every moment of the day from duty, friends, family and sleep.”
Stewart is ready to be rude about his fellow MPs: another quality which would have fitted him for life as a sketchwriter, for it is easier to be funny if one is willing to be rude.
He sketches the limitations of Liz Truss, for whom, when David Cameron gives him his first ministerial post, Parliamentary Undersecretary in the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, he finds himself working.
She asks him to prepare a ten-point plan for the national parks. He says he will get on with it: will visit the parks, get the heads of them down to London and have the plan ready for her within four weeks.
“You have three days, Rory,” she replies, “with such exaggerated firmness that I wondered if she were joking”, but she means it: “We need to get it into The Telegraph on Friday.”
She wants, he realises, “a press release, masquerading as a plan”. Much of what happens inside government is essentially unserious.
Cameron does not emerge well from this book, and Boris Johnson emerges worse: a man of “furtive cunning” with “a staggering willingness to insist on the untrue”, by whom “everything seemed curated for the British media, which didn’t demand detailed analysis”.
But Stewart is hard on himself too:
“I felt every snide comment about me in a newspaper was potentially career-ending and slept badly… I talked about seriousness, but I had no clear economic policies of my own and no vision for fixing the things that worried me about Britain. In short, while I complained about my colleagues and talked them down, the real person whom I despised in all of this was myself.”
He despises the political game, yet plays it with desperate enthusiasm. In a long profile of him which appeared in The New Yorker in 2010, just after he became an MP, Stewart said he would rather be Edmund Burke than Lord North:
“I would much rather be Burke. My greatest ambition would be to be somebody who made some kind of intelligent, lasting contribution to political thought, much more than working my way up through the system at the cost of being a mediocre Prime Minister. There is just no point in being Lord North.”
Lord North was an able parliamentarian and a loveable man, but has gone down in history as the worst British Prime Minister because during his 12 years in office the American colonies were lost.
Burke was a genius who stayed in the Commons for 28 years and will be read and quoted with delight as long as people are interested in politics.
Stewart, unlike either of them, has walked across Afghanistan, and written a wonderful account of that 32-day journey, The Places in Between.
But although he is opposed to “technocratic fallacies, and indifference to tradition”, and is very seldom dull, he is not a latter-day Burke. He is too consistently surprised by human folly; too ready to imply that despite that folly, the problems which confront us can be solved; too disinclined to derive wise general insights from particular occasions.
Burke had the gift of prescience. He might well have foreseen that the invasion of Iraq would turn out to be a disaster. Stewart, in a brief early passage, recalls that he supported the war, assuming “we could at least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein’s”.
He witnessed the “hysterical optimism” with which many politicians, and “experts” on Iraq, failed “to acknowledge our failure”, and continued to insist the occupation was a success, when it had become “a grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and democracy”.
In fairness to Stewart, one should concede that he gives chapter and verse about the ridiculously rapid turnover of ministers at Westminster, and the laughable inability either of them or of their civil servants to get to grips with various problems, or even to admit that they ought to be doing so.
But it seldom occurs to him that the precariousness of ministers, and ineptitude of the official machine, are also in some ways favourable to liberty.
A really strong state, working with Prussian efficiency, would be a danger to freedom.
He found, as he candidly admits in a note at the start of the book, that his first draft was far too long, and still “covered only a fraction of the events between 2010 and 2019”.
There is too much the author would like to say: a common enough problem in a memoir of this kind.
Stewart accordingly cut half his material, and worked very hard on the other half to make it as good as it could be, and to accommodate the criticisms of various friends.
The book no doubt gained in some ways from all this attention, but may also have lost a certain force and spontaneity as Stewart strove to please too many people.
At the end of the book, Stewart returns to the television debate in which his attempt to take on Johnson fizzled out:
“In the alien vacuum of the studio, marooned at the very edge of the stage, with no live audience to persuade, I felt like a satellite falling out of orbit.”
One cannot help reflecting that this debate did not matter nearly as much as he thinks it did. The Tory tribe had already decided that at this critical juncture, only Johnson could retrieve its fortunes.
Stewart himself admits that the One Nation Tories such as himself were “irredeemably split” between various different candidates. Johnson, whom they despised and underestimated, saw their weakness and walked all over them.