Like many on this blog, I’ve been in awe of AWS in his watching and reporting of Question Time each week so that we didn’t have to, and Powers’ indefatigable commentary each morning of GMB, a task I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. In that spirit I took Rory Stewart’s best seller “Politics on the edge” as one of my holiday books with half an eye to writing a review if I managed to complete it. I did so and in its own way, it wasn’t the ordeal I expected.
Stewart is a Scottish old Etonian. As Scotland has a surfeit of great public schools, I have no idea whether or not he was a rare product. Certainly the only other autobiography that I recall reading by a Scottish product of Eton and Oxford was that of the late broadcaster and author Sir Ludovic Kennedy whose book, “On my way to the club”, I can strongly recommend to Puffins. Certainly both books share the supreme gift of being very well written. I would compare and contrast with that product of Fettes, “the Eton of Scotland” and Oxford, Tony Blair’s “The Journey”, the turgid prose of which well merited Private Eye’s pithy comment “Was your journey really necessary ?”
The Telegraph states that he writes like PG Wodehouse although his meanders around Africa as a junior minister in the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development and then as Secretary of State for the latter Department brought to my mind the travails of the hapless William Boot in the incomparable “Scoop” by Evelyn Waugh.
It is a mixed yarn. He becomes an MP after getting on the selection list and being accepted for Penrith and the Borders after a Cameron reform open primary of the type which has led to so many Libdems masquerading as Tory MPs. However Stewart elegantly stilettoes Cameron himself by noting that, for all his pleas for diversity, his inner office consisted entirely on young old Etonians and he pompously told him that being a backbencher is the “greatest honour” to be had and that he would return to the backbenches to represent Witney “for the rest of my life” before executing the swiftest skedaddle in political history the day after the referendum.
He clearly loved his constituency in the “debatable lands” of the Border. However in debating whether they are Scottish or English he omits that to we Welsh Cumbria is “Yr Hen Gogledd” (the Old North) where Cumbric, closer to Welsh than is Cornish, was spoken until the Middle Ages and was the home of the poet Aneurin.
Stewart ruffled feathers early on in the Defence Committee where he ignored the conventions of Buggins’ Turn and caused the committee to conclude that Obama’s “surge” followed by withdrawal strategy in Afghanistan was bound to fail. I doubt whether the committee’s suggestion of retaining far fewer troops there but remaining sine die would have worked but it had the merit of a slim as opposed to no chance.
Stewart was given his first government position as the Parliamentary Under Secretary at DEFRA with the rural affairs brief and no budget to speak of. He did not take to his SoS, Liz Truss, who did not believe rural affairs as a section ought to have existed anyway. He seems to know his farming but makes an odd attack on the “Alsaka spruce” plantations of the Forestry Commission. I have to wonder whether he’d actually asked his officials about them as he would have learned that they were the product of the First World War when the Navy had to manage their essential importation as pitprops from Norway by convoy and the wisdom was shown in the Second World War when Norway was occupied by which time the country had become self sufficient. Of course they are now redundant but still more use, I think, than a windfarm array. Stewart is sadly a global warming loon. No doubt he is too young to remember 1976 when I recall a local field burning up to reveal the herring bone pattern of the land drains and being told by then “old timers” that it had last happened in 1921. Never happened since. I suppose he’d be one approving of the non personing of poor Professor Bellamy for pointing out the climate is not stable and constantly changes naturally. I suspect he worships at the Temple of Global Warming at UEA and its professorial High Priests.
He was in post for the great Cumbrian floods which included his own constituency and, as the junior minister responsible and the “man on the spot” , he thinks (probably correctly) that he did a competent job in the circumstances although marred by a throw away remark later put on Have I Got News For You that seemingly marked him out as a first class clot.
Cameron’s swift exit after the referendum led May appointing him to the deputy’s post at International Development under Pritti Patel and then his perambulations around Africa started. I think even he was disconcerted at the difference between the largesse thrown at other countries compared to his own previous budget for matters such as flood prevention for his own constituents. The Department seemed to run on splashing the cash to people that it prayed would not turn out to have the backstories for a Daily Mail feature, rather than doing actual good in the world.
May’s “win” in 2017 sent him to be a Minister of State at the Foreign Office responsible for sub Saharan Africa under his fellow old Etonian Boris Johnson, whom he observed unfavourably from close quarters for the first time. This did not seem a happy time for either. Stewart had a more prestigious title but no budget and Johnson was outside the Brexit negotiations. Even now , and very oddly not mentioned anywhere in the book, May was running negotiations directly with Brussels via Olly Robbins whilst David Davis was also negotiating with Barnier in blissful ignorance. The latter couldn’t have believed his luck. May’s Chequers Rule Taking Withdrawal Proposal followed by Davis’ understandable immediate resignation enabled Boris to jump ship. Stewart was a Remainer but supported May to the end.
The resulting reshuffle sent him to the Justice Department as Prisons Minister. This used to be the prime function of the Home Office and it is really odd to know why it still exists. Photos of its staff seem to indicate that it is now some sort of South Asian High Commission rather than a Department of the British nation State. Again, here I will give Stewart some credit. He tried to visit a different, usually provincial, prison each week and his descriptions are depressing in the extreme. He claims to have done some good and the statistics as to the reduction in prison violence seem to support him.
A further reshuffle sent him to the cabinet table for a brief spell at his old Department of International development before his career imploded over Brexit. The “fun” begins. Stewart’s position (my words not his) was that he was a passionate Remainer but acknowledged that the damage to the constitution of not completing a Brexit of some type could not be contemplated. He did not share the attitude of the Alistair Campbell’s of this world (more anon) that the plebs needed to vote again and again until they “got it right.” He considered May’s deal to be a workable compromise but saw it thwarted by the “Spartans” for not going far enough and by Labour who wished to Remain regardless. He picks out particularly Blair for his criticism of it notionally as a surrender but in reality as a way to prevent Brexit, no doubt for reasons that Brexit would prevent one of his own “fill yer boots” schemes. However his own remedy, remaining in the customs union like Turkey , would have been the worst of all worlds. He was up against Johnson and here his breathtaking naivity comes into play. He required Johnson to commit that the UK would not leave without a deal. Without that nuclear option we would never have left at all. Johnson has since stated that his subsequent actions (proroguing Parliament etc) ultimately convinced France and Germany that he was capable of doing it although he was desperate for a deal and one was done. Whatever our views of Johnson and honesty, this has a ring of truth. Stewart was wrong, very wrong. Counterfactually , this also shows the extreme poor judgement of our current PM from his own standpoint as then shadow Brexit Secretary. Support for May’s deal or an EFTA/EEA proposal from Labour would probably have succeeded and the result would have been far closer to his preference. Instead he bet the farm on thwarting Brexit completely and now has to live with it. Like Scargill forty years ago, he would not accept anything short of total victory and so received total defeat.
What else can we say of Stewart ? His father, to whom he was devoted (always a good sign), was in late middle age when he was born and he seems to have acquired some attitudes older than his generation. I was struck by an anecdote his father told him of how he trained infantry during the War in the tactics of advancing dispersed and seeking cover to witness an officer ordering a company to advance towards German machine guns in line abreast “like the Old Guard at Waterloo” to see them destroyed before they’d gone a quarter of the way. Such has been the quality of our leadership. Since 2019, he has returned to the groves of academia but now finds himself a star of stage and podcasts alongside Blair’s tribute act Dr Goebbels, Alistair Campbell, who hounded my compatriot, Dr Kelly, to his death. Needless to say, I have not allowed my computer to be infected by such tripe so have no idea how they appear. Of such are the mighty fallen.
In an unexpected postscript to his brilliant career as a political pundit, Stewart , now warmly feeling the pulse of the American people from his teaching post at Yale, advised people before the Donald’s triumph that the polls indicating that the contest was close were not to be taken seriously ( so far, so good) and that Harris was instead on course for a very big win (oops). He was going to bet one hundred thousand on it (dollars I assume) but later conceded that he had been unable to bet the full amount. He claimed he misread the signs because of his natural “optimism.” I’m rather inclined to the view that being out of touch for years may have been more to the point. Somewhere there is a bookie thinking, “where do these people come from and can I be sent some more ?”
© Bergen 2025
