Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Except the first door to which the computer directed us had a Labour poster in its window. The next target had been rented out as a student squat. We passed a house which the councillor said, morosely, contained Conservative voters, but which the software had failed to identify. It had taken me nine hours to get to Cheltenham from Cumbria. In three hours of campaigning we found only one potential Conservative voter. We reported this name to the campaign headquarters – now filled with Grant Shapps’s young activists apparently readying for the post-battle bus party. Jo got up from the table in quest of a cappuccino from Pret. Liz pushed over my diary for the next two weeks. Suzie handed me one of the red briefing folders, also marked with a gold royal cipher. Its neat sections, each marked by a coloured label, had just been pulled together for a minister, of whose identity they had been completely unaware 20 minutes earlier. I glimpsed in Tom’s hand what seemed to be my speeches from Hansard – presumably he had been reading them in the hope of getting some clues on my beliefs.
It also leaves you shaking your head with incredulity & wonderment on the subject of how Mr. Stewart survived the whole hellish process of political life and has come out the other end of the beast in one piece, while remaining a relatively sane, unembittered and balanced individual. One finds further amazement in the man’s stubbornness, tenacity and resiliency. Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber In which clever, reasonable officer-class virtue witnesses close up a historic outbreak of unreason and irresponsibility - and takes the subtlest of revenges. By producing the best-written account there will ever be of what has happened to the Conservative Party since 2010, Rory Stewart ensures that his version of events will endure when Boris Johnson is only the mouldering memory of a fright-wig Francis Spufford David Cameron, I was beginning to realise, had put in charge of environment, food and rural affairs a Secretary of State who openly rejected the idea of rural affairs and who had little interest in landscape, farmers or the environment. I was beginning to wonder whether he could have given her any role she was less suited to – apart perhaps from making her Foreign Secretary. Still, I could also sense why Cameron was mesmerised by her. Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of any of this for the way that government would work, she didn’t reveal it. Boris Johnson, having failed to prorogue Parliament, or deliver Brexit by 31 October has called an election for December. I am no longer a Cabinet minister, having resigned as soon as Boris Johnson became prime minister on 24th July. I am no longer a Conservative since Boris Johnson has thrown twenty-one of us out of the party for continuing to vote against a no-deal Brexit. But I would not be prepared, in any case, to campaign for him or his manifesto. Since I am unwilling to run as an independent in Penrith against people I have worked with for a decade, I will soon no longer be a Member of Parliament.”It’s hard to talk about a book like this without talking too tiresomely about your own politics (which must inevitably come under scrutiny if you’re to write a full review), so I’ll instead simply say that I think Rory has given us a very good book: Politics on the Edge is sharply and poetically written. In fact, it is sometimes a smidge overwritten. But, despite this quibble, I nonetheless found myself drawing a stylistic comparison between Rory and George Orwell. Orwell was also an Old-Etonian-Old-Oxonian child of colonialism who went on to have a colourful self-examined life preoccupied with thoughts weighed down in the mires of worldly geopolitical philosophies. This (admittedly grandiloquent) comparison probably only occurred to me because I’ve lately been on something of an Orwell binge and, yes, linking Rory to one of the 20th-century’s Great Writers is undoubtedly an overreach; regardless, I found Politics on the Edge achieves some of the same suspenseful intensity of Homage to Catalonia as well as the searing anti-establishmentarian ire of The Road to Wigan Pier — odd, given that it was written by a centre-right conservative rather than Orwell’s democratic socialist hand. Few political memoirs last for long. Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge may be an exception… Stewart’s memoir is a brilliant portrait of the Cameron-May-Johnson era. It is likely to become a classic on a par with Clark’s diaries Financial Times Extremely well written and a genuine pleasure to read… For anyone with an interest in politics it is well worth looking into John Stevenson MP, News and Star Off the public stage, she delighted in winding up colleagues. In my case – because she saw me as a foreign policy specialist – this involved saying: “I cannot see why you waste your time with foreign policy. I cannot imagine a job I would less like than to be Foreign Secretary, I think the Foreign Office is a waste of time.” Everything she did, I was concluding, had the flavour of a provocation. I guarantee, and will give you an omniscient bet, that the pollsters are wrong on that,” said Hatt.
An eye-opening (and highly enjoyable) read for anyone interested in understanding the realities of political power in the age of populism Yuval Noah Harari, author of SAPIENS Prison violence was on the way down when Stewart was asked to see the prime minister. With “some of the monarch’s stiff authority” Theresa May promoted him to a cabinet role split between the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where an unhappy Boris Johnson held the position of foreign secretary. As Stewart tells us: “A man who enjoyed the improbable, the incongruous and the comically over-stated had been trapped in a department whose religion was tact and caution.” A truly absorbing and fascinating book, Rory Stewart’s memoir reveals the scarring effect of disillusionment Come on Rory, I can write it myself already. Do you want me to give you some clues? Point one, connect young people with nature; point two, apprenticeships; point three, health and well-being… Make it eight points, if you can’t find 10. But ten is better.” And again she smiled, as though she were testing me. Along the way there were compensations. Stewart enjoyed being a constituency MP. He writes with lyrical fondness about Cumbria and its rustic voters. Surprisingly, he relished his time as prisons minister, managing to reduce drug and violence figures in 10 jails. He got better at politics, and at overcoming the inertia of civil servants. They tended to view ministers as ignorant and ephemeral and often spoke in corporate jargon. His warnings about Johnson – the politician and the man – were right.Did he worry about what they really believed about him, or the European Union? Did he speculate on how willing they would be, if one of his rivals such as Boris Johnson took over, to shift their allegiance, champion a completely different position, and deny that any contradiction had occurred? Did he ask himself whether the younger ones would be more idealistic and loyal to Cameron conservatism, or whether the older ones would prove more steady? Was he worried about who exactly Priti Patel or Liz Truss were, how well they governed, or what exactly they believed? I doubted it. But by promoting these people consistently, Cameron had created the future leadership candidates for the Conservative Party. And probably made at least one of them a future prime minister. Perhaps Kwasi and I found it difficult to believe in our government because it had given neither of us a job. But most journalists, and perhaps Cameron himself, also agreed that we could not win a majority and therefore would not be held to the promise of a referendum on Europe (the Lib Dems would throw the referendum out in the coalition agreement). I said, as politely as I could, that this was a joke. ‘I’ve just become a foreign minister. There’s no way I can possibly go . . . the man’s father was an officer in the KGB.’ She took the job description I had drafted, and glanced at it and said that too was fine. “Anything else?”
As if this were not enough, “to put an egotistical chancer like Boris Johnson into the heart of a system that was already losing its dignity, restraint and seriousness was to invite catastrophe”. He couldn’t help it. He had been “so interesting” ever since he entered the House of Commons as part of the 2010 intake. With the dust of the desert and the scuffing of the mountains on his boots and a CV straight out of John Buchan, Rory Stewart was the great fascinator among that cohort, refreshingly different from the sleek products of special adviserdom, Westminster think tank or management consultancy who joined Parliament with him. The second part discusses Stewart's work as a local member of parliament including his attempts to improve access to broadband in Cumbria and his work on select committees. [3] :192 During the spring of 2015, Cameron summoned us to a “retreat” in a conference hotel in his constituency in Oxfordshire. It was the parliamentary recess. Some MPs chose to stay away but most of us did what we were told and turned up. We rambled into the lecture hall bearing paper coffee cups and paper plates of Danish pastries and took our place in cinema seats. MPs whom I had only seen in dark suits and white shirts and blue ties were experimenting with the idea of casual clothes – one had a pair of pressed blue jeans, another a pink polo shirt. But only the prime minister’s inner circle wore sneakers. This political memoir is sui generis. Even the title betrays the contradictions of the work: Stewart is at once "on the edge" and "within". Rory Stewart has always made a virtue of his vulnerable transparency. He once asked a Financial Times profiler "do you think I should be prime minister?", and, while he is often consciously self-mythologising, he never recites false myth. Where, for example, Boris Johnson slaves to belie his true self, Rory Stewart slaves to announce his (or at least, his own conception of it). This makes the book utterly revealing and at times unsettling, and there are two narratives which both reveal and unsettle within.From beginning to end the reader is astonished that the author lasted as long as he did in a career field that seems not only not to value the qualities of honesty, integrity, truthfulness, any kind of loyalty or work ethic but essentially finds these qualities abhorrent to its mechanical day to day functioning. Compelling… Stewart's book is so well and often so wittily written, and so revealing about British politics from top to bottom, that it is destined to become a classic of the genre Literary Review A searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament from Rory Stewart, former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of breakout hit podcast The Rest Is Politics 'An instant classic' MARINA HYDE Any combination of insight, humanity, self-awareness and style in a political memoir is valuable. To achieve them all, as Rory Stewart has done, is exceptional Rafael Behr, author of POLITICS: A SURVIVOR'S GUIDE
Great Deal 
New Comment