If asked to give a sketch of the ideal Victorian politician, most of us would describe someone like Rory Stewart. A former high-ranking Middle East diplomat turned public intellectual and non-profit executive, fond of soaring grandiloquent rhetoric, classical allusions, and the scion of a family with a long tradition of public service. This uniquely antiquated personage very nearly made Stewart Prime Minister, but ultimately British conservatives chose to elevate Boris Johnson, who later brutally ended Stewart’s time in the Conservative Party.
In his recently published memoirs, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart tells the saga of this political rise and fall. Amid the swirl of history and amusing political anecdotes, there is a curious reflection on the various ailments plaguing British politics. In the course of recounting his many fascinating experiences, Stewart gives readers an idea of how moral purpose can be restored to a political world defined by selfish technocracy and dangerous populism.
Though not a household name in the United States, Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a leading figure in Britain. The son of a high-ranking intelligence official, he served for many years as a diplomat and nonprofit leader in the Middle East before entering politics as a member of the Conservative Party.
Very soon after entering the arena, Stewart began to fear that his conception of conservatism fundamentally clashed with the predominant view of those in power. In meetings with local officials, he often encountered a narrow parochialism. In conversations with politicians, he discovered that few concerned themselves with the glories of the British political tradition but instead with polling data and performance metrics. Both of these attributes—that of reactionary parochialism and professionalized, technocratic politics—flew in the face of Stewart’s most deeply held beliefs: “limited government and individual rights; prudence at home and strength abroad; respect for tradition” and love of country.
As Stewart goes on to battle a broken prison system, inefficient bureaucracies, and international terrorism, it becomes clear that the professional political class stood in the way of any hope of institutional reform. The complete incompetence Stewart encounters in the upper reaches of the British government is truly astounding: A Prime Minister who believes the push for Brexit is a manageable burst of economic discontent; a foreign minister more concerned with giving bold Periclean speeches than understanding the nuances of foreign policy; an environment minister who seems only to understand sound bites. The unifying theme across these many failures is that almost every public official Stewart mentions is entirely sure of their own rightness. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson believe they have correct answers to most questions. Even when found to be bewilderingly, earth-shatteringly wrong, most politicians refuse to admit failure of any kind. This is actually an attribute voters are initially inclined to respect but inevitably find frustrating as the failures of such leaders began to pile up.
Stewart spends a great deal of time on the human tragedy that such hubristic characters reveal. However, latent within his descriptions of such individuals and their political struggles is a larger battle between the forces of tribalistic populism and corporatized neoliberalism. The neoliberals—best captured by Prime Minister David Cameron and his key supporters—are sleek, professional, and meticulous. They are also entirely removed from the lives of everyday voters. Cameron neither seemed to know nor care about what goes on in the lives of the average British citizens, unless those views could be expressed through a polling spreadsheet. By the end of the book, this detachment from the public catches up to the neoliberals. Brexit completely destroyed their grip on the Conservative Party and (until the recent election of Sir Kier Starmer) banished their carefully sanitized liberalism to the rump of British politics. Though Stewart’s story focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, this exact series of events has played out in Western democracies across the world.
The populists are, as the name implies, not as distant from the minds of the people as their neoliberal opponents. Despite this, they prove themselves throughout the course of the book to be every bit as vapid and self-interested. Though Stewart certainly meets principled advocates of Brexit and supporters of Boris Johnson, many more seem to be grifters—mining the anger and resentments of their fellow citizens for personal benefit. Stewart rightly wagered both as a candidate for the leadership of his party and later as a citizen on the sidelines that this vapidness would catch up to the Johnson government.
In contrast to the political divides of the 20th century, what was once a battle between conservatism and liberalism is now essentially a battle between neoliberals and populists. In theory, this need not be a tragedy; political divisions reset with each new age and the parties eventually catch up to such changes. However, neither neoliberalism nor populism represents viable political solutions. After all, who in a moment of crisis wishes to turn to a hollowed-out liberal ethos or a politics of resentment?
This, then, is the crisis of our age. In a time of social and technological upheaval, there is no viable political alternative to solve the manifold crises we confront. Yet at the heart of Stewart’s depressing narrative lay the broad contours of a political disposition that could save us from ourselves. Nowhere is Stewart’s approach better exemplified than in a speech he delivered to officially launch his campaign for leader of the Conservative Party. In his exordium, Stewart declared that: “We have to make a choice between two different paths for our country. A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality.”
At first blush, this may sound like the sort of trite nonsense neoliberals say to discredit their opponents. Yet, as the speech continued, it becomes clear that Stewart is offering a bold alternative to all of modern politics. He talked about “love, and loving the reality of place,” and how we need institutions that permit greater input from the people themselves. His speech ends on a poetic note, quoting a line from T.S. Eliot: “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
Realism, love, localism, democracy, and humility—these may not seem like the typical foundations for a political movement. Yet that is precisely their strength. Over the course of his memoirs, Rory Stewart lays bare the fatal weaknesses of the political establishment, but he closes by granting hope to the reader. For in his dynamic and unusual approach to politics, one can start to detect the sort of moderate politics that could one day replace neoliberalism and stand on its own against nationalism—a politics grounded in place, conviction, and the honest humility that government can never provide all the answers to all of humanity’s problems.
