Politics On The Edge by Rory Stewart

A depressing insight into the UK government machine by a former minister

I can’t offhand think of any other political memoirs I’ve read, nor indeed any books by other politicians¹. Despite listening sporadically to Ed Miliband’s engaging Reasons To Be Cheerful podcast for a few years, I haven’t read the Bumper Book of Big Ideas that sprang from it, nor have I read the works of the apparently intelligent and ponderous Gordon Brown. So what made me read this?

I’d heard that it at least purported to be candid, that it dished the insider dirt on a Conservative government I loathed. Would I, in all honesty, have been as keen on a similar book about a Labour government? Maybe, if it had been written by the aforementioned Ed Miliband — like Rory Stewart, I find him interesting and earnest, if not always aligned with my way of thinking.

Perhaps a key point is that I have read one of Rory Stewart’s books before — The Marches, which is mainly about walking Hadrian’s Wall with his dad — and although it strayed off topic sometimes, it was enjoyable.

This book too was enjoyable on the whole and often wryly amusing. I enjoyed the sections on being a backbencher and running for party leader the most; the ministerial sections sometimes got too far into the detail of the policy he was working on. I did a development economics course about 10 years ago and I struggled to follow some of the stuff on international development progress in Africa, so if it’s not your bag at all you will probably find it hard to wade through those bits.

It gives a fascinating insight into how to become an MP; as he says, some of it was specific to that time and that party but much of it is universal. The time, energy and money that a candidate needs to devote to it is answer enough to the perpetual question of why there aren’t more ‘ordinary people’ in parliament. The other part of the answer comes with media scrutiny — Stewart with his unsuspecting naivety walks straight into journalistic traps or hands them headlines that are too good to pass up, and then takes the write-up, the below-the-line comments and the Twitter discussion too much to heart. He even mentions feeling suicidal at one point because of this.

He is undoubtedly eccentric — I’m sure he would acknowledge that most prospective MPs in the early 21st century would not attempt to familiarise themselves with their constituency on foot, sleeping under hawthorn hedges along the way. It’s the fact that his colleagues see diligence and critical thinking as more evidence of his eccentricity that irks him. As he says, ‘the very skills which helped them get elected and promoted undermined their ability to think clearly about what the country needed.’

He exposes Westminster as a shallow, bitchy ecosystem disconnected from the world outside it for the most part. But didn’t we already know, or at least strongly suspect, that to be the case? Is it only Rory Stewart himself, full of his old-fashioned views on public service and having lived outside the UK for many years, that expected anything different?

He seems to me to have misunderstood what politics is about. He has been a diplomat, and run charities, and felt the satisfaction of achievement. He says when he becomes a Foreign Office minister and learns about what’s actually going on in sub-Saharan Africa as opposed to the fairytale-like reports, ‘I wondered whether we could not achieve more by recognising our constraints, and our modest — but real — strengths.’ Not realising that politicians talk up possibilities. And in truth, there aren’t many of their constituents who would prefer them to be wholly open and straight-talking.

It occurred to me that if he wasn’t so posh and so high-flying — he resigned as a professor at Harvard to become an MP — he would have joined a board of governors or trustees at a local school, housing association, NHS Trust or the like, maybe stood for the local council and put his name on the rota to drive the community minibus that gets local pensioners to outpatients appointments. Becoming an MP was his way of satisfying a common drive to ‘give something back’.

He does not like David Cameron, that much is clear from the first appearance of Cameron in these pages. He doesn’t much like Boris Johnson either, though for different reasons. Though he doesn’t always name colleagues, he describes them, and where he’s quoted a parliamentary speech it’s the work of a moment to type a suitable phrase into Hansard online and find out who he’s referring to. I couldn’t decide whether this was performatory protectiveness (‘look, I never revealed their name’) or another example of his naivety, believing his readers wouldn’t go digging.

Stewart does sometimes come across as a needy people-pleaser, sucking up to Cameron when he was hoping to get noticed, attempting to trade Classical witticisms with BoJo, failing to ‘rekindle’ a friendship with Kwasi Kwarteng that sounds like it was based on one conversation they had aged 14, but he does at least criticise himself for some of it.

Overall he comes across as frustrated and disappointed, believing nobody else to be as serious as him, as determined to do good, as diligent, conscientious, or knowledgable about Afghanistan and Iraq (and by extension, any similar military intervention and rebuilding strategy). The job he enjoyed the most was, he thought, the one he was least suited to: minister for prisons. Perhaps his lack of experience was the key — no preconceptions and a willingness to be guided by advisers.

He did provide some interesting insights into failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as behind the scenes views of the workings of parliament that were like a mash-up of Yes Minister and the more recent Mitchell and Webb series Ambassadors, but without the laughs. For instance the party whips running their MPs by intimidation, so that nobody dare vote against the government even though they may be betraying their constituents in the process.

It did make me wonder what MPs are for — and by extension, ministers and their departments. It’s an interesting question, perhaps one we ought to have as a nation, but we continue to bumble along and hope it sort of works.

Stewart does attempt some analysis of what is wrong, what needs to change and his own failures, like going along with things he should have challenged. With hindsight he identifies some of his blind spots and obsessions, and admits (in the context of running to be Conservative leader and thus take over as Prime Minister): ‘Faced with the problems of the nation, I felt the same sense of shallow half-understanding that I experienced reading a primer on astrophysics.’

I have a minor criticism of his occasional lack of context. Though I was following politics reasonably closely for much of the period covered by the book, at this distance it took me a moment to recall that Cameron must have been Leader of the Opposition in 2006 when he visited Afghanistan, and I can’t remember who was Labour leader when Cameron did his first PMQs as PM. In the introduction he mentions how much he’s had to cut, but he surely could have spared a few words here and there for that sort of detail.

Politics On The Edge left me enlightened in some areas, depressed but not entirely surprised about others, and provided some amusement along the way. Though it did unfortunately lend weight to my dad’s opinion that Rory Stewart is just as bad as the rest.

1. It occurred to me eventually that I read Victorian PM Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil in 2014 but I can’t remember anything about it