Rory Stewart left Parliament five years ago to put principles before party and power. Here, the ex-Conservative talks to Richard Nye about death, dishonour and doing politics well...
As usual Shakespeare nails it. “Life every man holds dear,” proclaims Hector in Troilus and Cressida, “but the brave man holds honour far more precious-dear than life.” And in Rory Stewart – polymath, podcaster, adventurer, author and one-time renegade Conservative MP – the towering Trojan warrior finds a living embodiment of the creed.
“I’ve never been frightened of death,” reflects Rory, beaming and relaxed in the back of the taxi, whisking him to the next appointment of the day.
“As a child, I was entranced by the idea of dying heroically in battle, of taking a bullet to save someone else. What frightened me, almost neurotically, was the thought of disgrace and dishonour.”
The claim rings true. This, after all, is the man who rose to near-celebrity eminence by refusing to serve in the ministry of Boris Johnson, repulsed by what he saw as the populist degeneracy of the Johnsonian Whitehall farce. But his instinct for smiling at danger runs deep. Long before he was the Tory who turned, Rory Stewart was a schoolboy dreamer – Etonian like his blond-mopped nemesis – engorged on Byron and Shelley and expecting to die by 30; a traveller who spent two years walking across Asia, including Afghanistan tout seul; an official in Iraq’s transitional government, striving against the dusty, volatile chaos that followed the US-led invasion of 2003.
We are talking about the anniversary of the Normandy landings. Stewart’s father crossed the Channel on D-Day +4 and was wounded in a tank battle, but he recovered to serve his country as a colonial official and Assistant Chief of MI6. Perhaps this paternal blend of duty, courage, and intrepid overseas engagement lies a clue to the shaping of the son.
“Perhaps,” agrees Rory. “But my father was more robust than me. He had a rough, tough, pragmatic approach – just get the job done. He didn’t brood if people didn’t like him, whereas if someone accuses me of dishonour, I am mortified.”
The vulnerability is striking. Everything about his manner – the finely-tuned courtesy, the rich-toned delivery punctuated by unhurried pauses for thought – suggests the serenity of a mill pond. But below the surface calm there are tensions.
On the one hand, he is restless for change, itching to clear out the Stability of the Augean political culture, which has turned sour. But his travels at home and abroad, in addition to inspiring a prizewinning corpus of depth and literary flair – his latest book, Politics on the Edge, is out now in paperback – have imbued him with an empathy for the world as it actually is; a talent for seeing others in the same light as they see themselves.
“Yes, I agree, there’s a tension there. One part of me is Tory – my passion for history, landscape, dry stone walls, and my deference to tradition. When I was in Afghanistan, for example, I loved the people immensely – their dignity and the clarity of their culture. Ultimately, of course, Western society is better, but we’ve lost so much along the way.
“Yet I also have a liberal reformer side which sits very oddly with all that. The tension comes out in my politics. Part of me thinks it’s all about character and virtue and getting a better elite; that what we need is not fewer Etonians, but better Etonians. The other part thinks that it’s structural; that we have to change the electoral system and tear down the disgraceful, hypercritical structures that have failed us for so long.”
In his beloved Afghanistan, however, and then in Iraq, it was zeal for tearing down that opened the door to disaster, as the invasions of those two countries helped to write the epitaph for the liberal global ideal. From his front-row seat – and then from the stage itself – Stewart watched in horror as the dying dream twitched.
“Initially, I just thought we needed time to sort things out. But being on the ground convinced me that it was mission impossible, as we no longer produced people like my father who were prepared to do the hard yards, to learn the language of the country they were administering and stay out there for 12 years. I don’t blame our leaders for intervening, but the problem was their inability to admit failure and change course. That’s one of the tragedies with politics: once something goes wrong, we refuse to see it for fear of the cost.”
Is the public partly to blame? By denying them the space to fail, do we tempt our politicians to spin narratives of shallow pretence?
“I think that’s right. Liz Truss was a poor prime minister, but we have created the climate and culture in which someone like that could flourish. It requires someone quite unusual now to do politics well.”
Like Aristotle, the ancient Greek champion of the golden mean—that ideal midpoint between extremes of deficiency and excess—is a philosophical hero for Stewart, who frequently contrasts him with the villainous Machiavelli, the intellectual godfather of the cynical quest for power. Yet true centrism, insists Stewart, is not a “muddle in the middle”: the trade-off between principle and pragmatism is a far more calibrated affair.
“Politics is probably 98% utilitarian, but eventually you reach a place that requires you to draw a line and say: ‘I’m not doing that.’ And that’s difficult because human nature, for very good reasons, is tribal and conformist. No one wants to be seen as a self-serving narcissist. German policemen who refused to shoot women and children for the Nazis did not, in fact, feel virtuous. Nor did their colleagues respect them for it after the war. They just felt they’d left them to do the dirty work.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Stewart is not as gloomy as some about looming threats beyond these shores. Sir Patrick Sanders, the former Chief of General Staff, recently set spines shivering by referring to a “pre-war generation.” Land war with Russia, he insisted, was no retro menace from a museum of the 1960s. Rory Stewart, however, disagrees.
“I don’t believe that we are facing an existential threat. If Ukraine were to fall, Putin might be tempted to chew on a Baltic state. But Russian tanks rolling towards Paris? I don’t see it. Politicians and generals should be careful of inflated rhetoric.
“But if we had to fight, we would. Indeed, our culture shies away from death, but Covid shows we can adapt quite quickly. People said that British society would never accept a lockdown, but if anything, it accepted it rather too readily. It was the same before the First World War when they said that the population had gone soft. It hadn’t then, and it hasn’t now.”
Stewart has long since withdrawn from the front line on the domestic battlefield. As hundreds of new MPs swarm eagerly around Westminster, the fighting on the benches is over for Rory Stewart. Or is it?
“With politics, I can’t say whether I’m resting or retiring,” he admits.
“But if Patrick Sanders is right about future conflict, I would consider it my duty to return to public service.”
The sword of honour, it seems, is not lightly sheathed.
Politics on the Edge is published by Penguin Random House, £10.99
