In a way, it is a great demonstration of the reality of the sad nature of modern (British) politics that it is structurally limited to be more inhibited by careerists and sycophants than by actually interesting and skilled leaders. That the politics is so separated from real life - through the parliamentary groupings and necessity to show loyalty to the whips, or by the generalist and extremely myopic nature of the modern civil service. Yet Stewart emerges from the carnage a stronger character. He realises that up against the aggressive exaggeration of the European Research Group, his allies on the Tory benches are “like a book club going to a Millwall game”. It doesn’t make him any less intense and he still takes himself far too seriously, but the prisons job and defending what he (and I) saw as a reasonable solution to a 52-48 referendum result ends his “queasiness about confrontational politics”. May goes. Stewart’s wife thinks he should stand for leader. I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t feel like what I mean by power. I felt far more powerful running a small NGO in Kabul.’ Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels very distant and theoretical. In Kabul, we delivered the first water supply, the first sanitation, the first electricity for people who had never had these things before. Every week, we seemed to be erecting a new building. It was fast. I was on the ground, shaping, managing. Not signing paper in an office. I was confident that I was changing lives.’

Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within* | Fox Lane Books Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within* | Fox Lane Books

From the former Conservative Cabinet minister and co-presenter of 2022's breakout hit podcast The Rest is Politics, a searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament 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.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.’ It is hard to disagree with any of Stewart’s conclusions, about the dire state of our politics, and the strange and empty character of its representatives. I was left wondering if he would have had a less bruising time as a Labour MP. In 2019 Johnson purged leading remainers and Stewart quit both the Tories and his seat. Last year he reinvented himself as one half of a hugely successful current affairs podcast, The Rest Is Politics, co-hosted with Alastair Campbell. Stewart’s account of his own crusade against a no-deal Brexit – leading him to eventually be ejected from the Conservatives – comes bearing a similar instinct to wallow in one’s doomed righteousness. Stewart now hosts the wildly popular podcast The Rest is Politics with former Labour spindoctor Alastair Campbell. He inspires fervent devotion from a particular brand of moderate – attracted to his eloquence and sanity. It is perhaps the most popular the man has ever been. 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. And a party that seeks to take down May rather than endorse her apparently ingenious Brexit deal completely confounds those who self-style as cool-headed rationalists. In short, the problem – as diagnosed by May and Stewart – is not in fact anything to do with the institutional “abuse of power” or the systematic eschewal of expertise. No, their problem is that the Conservative party does not specifically reward people like them.

Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within - Hardcover - AbeBooks Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within - Hardcover - AbeBooks

But you are changing far more lives now – one stroke of a pen on plastic bags has changed the behaviour of millions.’ 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 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. The first is the narrative about the British political system. It is genuinely enlightening to be introduced to the various byzantine structures that a politician must navigate through the raw eyes of a naive first-timer: the party machine (whips, wannabe grandees & the PM inclusive), the British press, and the Civil Service. The first impressions are laughable and absurd. After twenty chapters, it becomes hard to laugh. But the overall narrative seems to be that no one is really in charge, and no one is interested in taking charge. No one is concerned about the details, except for all the people too concerned with the details. Yes, Minister prefigured this by forty years, but it is harder to swallow when you realise that it really, really is true. The most comically dark passage is Stewart's determination to cease funding to north-west Syria, for fear that the UK government is inadvertently cashing up members of al-Qaeda. Months of flying Bond-like around the world to find out who truly possesses the authority to cut the program leaves him with no answers. He had been told that the decision had to come, variously, from him, from the secretary of state, from the prime minister, from MI5 or MI6, from the NSC, from Cabinet, from the senior civil servants within his department, from the embassy on the ground, from the foreign secretary, even from the American president. Despite all this, the funding never stops. That is, until months later when Stewart was proved entirely correct: Britain had been sending money that ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda. As soon as bad press was on the horizon, the funding stopped... When Stewart talks of political communication rather than decision making, someone like Baudrillard would find himself surprised precisely never. Discussions about policy have been hollowed out by a party machine obsessed with shaping the narrative, a fourth estate obsessed with misrepresenting it, and a constituency of voters obsessed with ignoring it.PDF / EPUB File Name: Politics_On_the_Edge_-_Rory_Stewart.pdf, Politics_On_the_Edge_-_Rory_Stewart.epub Rory Stewart was never going to be prime minister. He had far too many glaring flaws. For one, he’d held a variety of difficult jobs in the real world (soldier, diplomat, professor at Harvard), rather than becoming a Spad straight out of Oxford, like modern MPs are meant to. For another, his speeches made it sound as if he’d given actual thought to the subject at hand, rather than just reciting a list of crowd-pleasing soundbites scripted by a strategist. Most damaging of all, however, was the inescapable impression that he said things because he genuinely meant them, rather than because a pollster had told him they would be popular. As a result, he was entirely unsuited to modern politics, and his campaign to become PM in 2019 ended in swift and crushing failure. Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber 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 It doesn’t help that so few people at the top, or indeed anywhere else in politics, seem to have a clue what they’re doing. Time and again, ministers find themselves abruptly appointed to jobs for which they have little if any relevant experience, aptitude or even enthusiasm. Barely have they begun to get to grips with the role than they’re just as abruptly shunted off to another. Stewart deplores “how grotesquely unqualified so many of us were for the offices we were given”, and “a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation”. By the time he launches his bid for No10, he sounds so miserably disillusioned it’s a wonder he found the energy to sign his nomination papers.

Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart review – blistering Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart review – blistering

It’s tempting to say that he wasted 10 years trapped in the party politics he abhors. But this book is a vital work of documentation: Orwell down the coal mine, Swift on religious excess. We should be grateful it was written and that Stewart never stopped being interesting. 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. 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). 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’ 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.”

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This is personified by Stewart’s recollection of the Conservative Party leadership race towards the end of the book. At times, the reader is left feeling frustrated and helpless to the remarkable events that unravel, much as Stewart appeared to have felt at the time. This feeling perfectly captures the sentiment of many members of the British electorate, from both sides of the political spectrum, whose interest in politics has declined in a linear manner to the increase in populistic tendencies in British politics. Over the past 13 years of Tory rule, the party has chaotically and destructively managed Britain’s exit from the European Union; sifted through five prime ministers; endured the paroxysm of madness under Liz Truss; been gripped by internecine warfare in the House of Commons; and shaken up its political identity countless times. 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. On the plus side, the book is often entertaining. Stewart vividly records his encounters with the key figures of his time, and while it’s not necessarily breaking news that David Cameron is a glib hypocrite, Boris Johnson a charming liar and Liz Truss a gibbering nitwit, it’s enjoyable to read fresh evidence of it. Particularly amusing are Stewart’s memories of Steve Hilton, the shoeless svengali of Cameron’s No10. During one visit of Downing Street, the author finds Hilton on the floor gazing at a map, murmuring: “F— me, look how big Scotland is. This is just f—ing mad, man.” 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.