Rory Stewart’s book: Politics on the edge

Life has its charms. Serendipity for example. We run a community book exchange in a small Pyrenean town and a man came in with a sack of orange cover Penguin paperbacks, yellowing but whole — a slice of someones reading life from the early nineteen sixties.
I binged on the C.P. Snow Strangers and Brothers saga: carefully plotted, first person narrative accounts of high doings in academia and politics from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties. C.P. Snow is very good on English weather and London street scenes — flames flicker from coal fires reflected by uncurtained windows as a winter’s day fades and guests are offered drinks. People still dress for dinner and the ladies leave the men.
He is also very good on politics. Corridors of Power the last of the series, published in 1964, deals with Westminster and Whitehall and grand houses, grappling with the Bomb. The central figure, pushing a radical policy, is a rising politician called Roger Quaife.
The doorbell rang, I put the book down, pulled myself out of my chair and went downstairs. The postwoman had a package from England. I scratched my nail across glass for it, she hopped onto her electric trike and I ripped open the cardboard.
Rory Stewart’s Politics on the edge — a memoir from within is about how he pierced the political world, carried out some tasks and was spat out after his failure to beat Boris in the leadership stakes. The book itself (a handsome hardback on good quality paper from the Jonathan Cape imprint) has been culled down from two hundred and twenty thousand words. Just occasionally one catches the ghost of a careless cut and paste or a mistaken particle but for a contemporary book it is pleasingly free of proof reading errors.
The last seventy pages echo Corridors of Power, the struggle gets close up and nasty. Michael Gove might have stepped out of a C.P. Snow, at a dinner party he sneers down the table at Rory,
“… just imagine a jihadi broke into your house and the choice was either to let a jihadi kiss Shoshana or something worse, which would you do?”
Shoshana is the name of Rory’s wife. Whether even Gove understood the analogy is not clear. Was the jihadi Boris? Or was Boris the worse thing?
Rory had been selected in 2009 as prospective Conservative Party candidate for the Borders and Penrith constituency, the most extensive English constituency, sprawled like a cast sleeping bag north and south across Hadrian’s Wall, part prim heritage townships, part empty wastes over which cattle thieves thundered under feudal law. (I lived there for a time beneath the brutalist hulk of the Blue Streak missile test site at Spadeadam).
Rory did what he is known for, he walked the constituency thinking deeply: how to get broadband, what to do about that lousy hospital, how to boost the Mountain Rescue teams. At Westminster he was conflicted straightaway, he wanted to do things but his party just wanted him to be loyal. On an amendment affecting Mountain Rescue he hid in the toilet, abstaining, against the power of the whips. On the ground he was good at conjuring enthusiasts, with their help broadband wriggled up the lonely valleys — people could work from home, could tele-consult with doctors but after four years he questioned his usefulness, being District Commissioner for Cumbria was not quite it.
Then Prime Minister Cameron gave him a job and he was a Minister from the spring of 2015 up to summer 2019 but the Whitehall, the Westminster in which Rory moved and had his being was not that of the nineteen fifties. There is a fleeting reference in Corridors of Power to “lurkmen” — distasteful but necessary men who leak private political information to the newspapers for money. By Rory’s time the bandwidth has broadened, Liz Truss tells him to fix up a plan for the National Parks,
“… you have three days. We need to get it into the Telegraph for Friday”.
And then there was Twitter. Rory takes to it, he generates a novel form of campaigning, he pops up everywhere and begins to stream his encounters. He capitalises his histrionic flair. He gets ahead of the game, he builds a team and then he loses the last televised debate.
“… I felt trapped in the clichéd predicament of a poorly cast contestant in a low-budget reality TV show”
Reading the book nobody could doubt Rory’s executive capabilities, his ability to see the root of the problem and apply a cure — he did it at the Ministry of Justice by getting some rigour into improving prison conditions and behaviours,
“… lets start by fixing the broken windows”
He had done it abroad with his build from the ground up work in Afghanistan. Maybe England wasn’t yet in a desperate enough condition for his services to be required. And there was his quixotic, heraldic strand, that affection for the military (like Dominic Cummings) the slim bright scarlet thread linking him back to pass the port and slice, not scoop, the Stilton. He is perhaps out of Simon Raven rather than C.P. Snow.
Post Westminster Rory cleansed himself by working for a charity like that other missed my chancer David Milliband who lost in the Labour leadership contest to his brother Ed. A necessary humbling after hubris. Rory and David became two political spare particles cruising global trouble space, the world as a place, a constituency, a strand of thought that meshes with the parts of the Brexit apparat that wants to get into supra-national orbit.

Finlan O’Toole in his book Heroic Failure (Apollo 2018) points out one of the drolleries of the Brexit movement, the alliance of well-heeled tax avoiding internationally connected people and the thuggish stay at home poor. He mentions in passing that Brexit super-star Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father co-wrote a book The Sovereign Individual (Simon & Schuster 1997) that proposed the rich make themselves independent of nation states. The subtitle is How to survive and thrive the collapse of the Welfare State. The authors say,
“… we believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organised religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics…”
Clearly, for some, Brexit is a pole vault into a new reality, the excessive St George Cross and Dunkirk flummery is camouflage or bait for the thugs. The object is a state reduced to an honours awarding monarchy and the military that protects it.
Meanwhile the limits on speech, the formalisms, at the House of Commons, (aka the talking shop) have pushed MP’s onto the tv sofas. GB TV is stuffed with them. Rory has acted with distinction, he goes chuckle head to knuckle head with Alistair Campbell on The rest is politics. Perhaps the sharp twisting motion that the combination of two quasi-european wars and Brexit have given to UK politics with all the attendant strains and nuisances will give an opportunity for Rory to step back in thru the window and help clean house. Fifty is a good age. He should be warned — does he really want to take life as easy as Michael Portillo, one time poster boy and Cabinet Minister, now a flesh padded comfort zone babbling train journeys?