DAVID CAMERON, Boris Johnson, and Rory Stewart were all educated at Eton and Oxford. Two became Prime Ministers; one did not. Already an acclaimed author, Stewart (Features, 3 November) — with ruthless honesty, not least about himself — describes his nine years in Parliament, concluding with the débâcle of the second television debate that led to his elimination from the chance to challenge Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party. It is both a riveting and painful read, which, frankly, exposes the glaring inadequacies of the dysfunctional way in which Britain is governed.

Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Politics On the Edge invites us into the mind of one of the most interesting actors on the British political stage. I’ve never usually been a fan of slogging through political memoirs, particularly those from Tories that only held a seat for less than a decade, but after being a longtime listener of his podcast with Labour’s Alistair Campbell I was tempted to give this a go, and I’m glad I did. Disillusionment was swift. MPs were uninterested in policy, he discovered. Instead they were obsessed with scandal. He found “impotence, suspicion, envy, resentment, claustrophobia and Schadenfreude”. Cameron made speeches about diversity. But he filled his private office with white-shirted old Etonians, drawn “from an unimaginably narrow social group”. In one vote Stewart rebelled over an amendment on mountain rescue by hiding in the loo. No one noticed.

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. Another unusual aspect is that Stewart often declines to mention names, thus suggesting a veneer of discretion, but gives you enough hints that anyone with access to a search engine or Wikipedia could probably work out who he is referring to. This faux anonymity is a bit annoying, as it doesn’t seem to achieve anything, and anyone who Stewart despises gets named repeatedly (primarily Boris Johnson). 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 May’s treatise on the state of modern Britain, The Abuse of Power, is well-intentioned but hard work. In it, she chronicles miserable episodes in the country’s recent history – hopping between the Hillsborough disaster, sex abuse scandals, Brexit and modern slavery. Those who run the country, she contends, too frequently put their personal interests before the greater good. She applies this rather banal logic to parliament: Labour, Speaker of the House John Bercow (whom she clearly loathes) and many on her own team wielded their power to disingenuously thwart her Brexit deal and harm the nation. Stewart, it seems, was confused that this roster of “the uncurious, uncritical, inept” were selected to build the modern Conservative Party instead of, erm, him. It is hard not to read into the thinly veiled subtext that the worst thing about Cameron is not his politics or his management style, nor his elevation of Liz Truss, but that he held little affection for Rory.

Loved the parts when Rory realises the reality of power in modern state and politics and an absolute highlight is this part when he is the most junior minister at the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) : 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.

How do you feel, about the other parts of the job,’ John persisted, ‘now that you have real power? It’s a drug, isn’t it, power? I bet you’re glad now you didn’t give up on being an MP.’ Next, Stewart was reshuffled to the Ministry of Justice, where, against all odds, by adopting what he called a “loving strict” policy, long practised by good head teachers, Stewart reversed the endless climb in prison violence and supply of drugs, and made prison a more humane experience. Through his hands-on approach, he came to realise the “extraordinary, sometimes almost beautiful qualities in prison officers and prisoners. It was the first role in government I had really loved.” Politics always seemed to me like some monolithic, Mammon-oriented Rube Goldberg Machine whose main function is to serve itself while using up resources and churning out illusions as well as mostly avoiding any positive outcome based on reality. Stewart’s recent work, I think is an eloquent document of support with regard to this view. When serving as a minister under Truss he recalls her requesting him to slash the budget of his department by 20 per cent. Stewart expressed natural consternation at such an ask, but Truss reassured him: “I have a mentor who is a very successful businessman who says all businesses can always be cut by 20 per cent.” So, when Stewart rattles off the innumerable social, moral and political failings of some colleagues he – more often than not – seems to have a perfectly legitimate case.

Recognising that fawning loyalty was necessary for promotion, Stewart began to play the game, despising himself in the process. He even considered standing down at the next election. But that would have been a betrayal of his constituents, for whom he worked assiduously — work that made up for all the frustrations of Parliament. At last, after the 2015 election, Cameron appointed Stewart a junior Minister at DEFRA, under Liz Truss. The context of Stewart’s political career includes extensive professional experience in the Middle East in both the military and in various developmental roles, and an education at the prestigious institutions of Westminster and Oxford. The latter of which has produced many of Stewart’s Conservative Party peers, notably including David Cameron, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, all of which feature throughout Stewart’s memoir. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. Austerity was beginning to bite, and when a journalist suggested that his constituency was too prosperous to feel its effects, Stewart replied that parts of it were “pretty primitive” and some farmers used twine to hold up their trousers. Cue a media storm so vicious he contemplated suicide. But the tough hill farmers who he thought he’d insulted were more amused than outraged, and at the 2015 election his majority nearly doubled. Stewart realises that up against the aggressive exaggeration of the ERG, his allies are ‘like a book club going to a Millwall game’ R ory Stewart’s CV would put most of us to shame. Still only fifty, he’s been a tutor to princes, a serving soldier, a British diplomat (and, some say, an intelligence officer), an acclaimed travel writer, deputy governor of an Iraqi province, a charity founder, a Harvard professor, a Member of Parliament, a cabinet minister and a Tory leadership contender. But it’s only in the last year or two, primarily in his role as co-presenter of one of the country’s most popular podcasts, The Rest is Politics, that he’s become something of a national treasure.Long passages in this chapter advocate for all the merits of the agreement – its sensitivity to Ireland, its best-of-both-worlds problem-solving. I find it convincing now as I found it convincing then. But her abject failure to interrogate, deeply, why Remainers and Leavers alike didn’t see promise in her arrangement is telling. She thinks they crashed her deal just “because they could” without considering that anyone might have good reason to. It was now with three defeats for her Brexit deal behind her, and a crumbling administration, that May promoted Stewart to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development. PDF / EPUB File Name: Politics_On_the_Edge_-_Rory_Stewart.pdf, Politics_On_the_Edge_-_Rory_Stewart.epub He is kinder about Theresa May. After the Brexit vote and Cameron’s resignation, May made Stewart development minister, followed by prisons, and then promoted him to cabinet as secretary of state for international development. Unusually for a front-rank politician, she had a “private personality”. Stewart supported her EU withdrawal agreement, as hardline Brexiters plotted her overthrow, and the party lurched into magical thinking. Politics, he came to think, was a “rebarbative profession”... He developed migraines and kept going by taking painkillers

But his voice has not been silenced. With Alastair Campbell, he has created the popular podcast The Rest is Politics. Yet, as this memoir shows, his straightforward honesty, accompanied by his ability to think outside the box in all four of the ministries in which he served, indicates his huge loss to Parliament. He was originally a youthful Labour supporter. Perhaps a Starmer government could provide the answer? Yet, in 2009, Rory found himself considering an unlikely move. David Cameron had reopened the Conservative candidates’ list to ‘anybody who wants to apply’. He decided to stand. But you are changing far more lives now – one stroke of a pen on plastic bags has changed the behaviour of millions.’If it was the kind of open primary that saw Stewart adopted as a parliamentary candidate, he’d have walked it. But it wasn’t, and even if he’d made it through to the final two, the withered husk of the Tory membership was always going to vote for Johnson. In the end Stewart was expelled from the party, along with Churchill’s grandson, two ex-chancellors and six other former cabinet ministers. That does not mean he is always an excellent administrator or that I would believe he was a great minister - a lot of the initiatives he was pursuing seemed quite random an unstructured. But he cared and wanted to actually do things well, even through he was also changed by the system’s pressure to create own projects that would push one’s career up. If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us