No wonder this Remoanerish, elitist peacock with a disdain for vulgar democracy is now the Left’s favourite ‘Tory’
Britain’s most waspish political voice QUENTIN LETTS on the cult of ‘Saint’ Rory Stewart: No wonder this Remoanerish, elitist peacock with a disdain for vulgar democracy is now the Left’s favourite ‘Tory’
Rory Stewart is the Norma Desmond of our politics. In the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard, a character tells the one-time Hollywood diva: ‘You was once in silent photos. You was once massive.’ To which Norma drawls: ‘I’m massive. It’s the photos that obtained small.’
Everyone loves Norma, so scented and actressy, so sure of her greatness. And everybody, we’re informed, loves Rory. So civilised. So centrist!
Stewart, 50, is the former Conservative Cabinet Minister who was virtually the final individual to defend Theresa May’s premiership after which tried to develop into Prime Minister earlier than he misplaced his parliamentary profession over Brexit.
In latest weeks, he has been filling theatres doing a double-act with his podcast colleague Alastair Campbell, and final week he revealed a quantity of memoirs about his 9 years at Westminster.
The guide is vivid and humorous, taking us behind the arras and describing the mad steeplechase of ministerial life.
MPs deal with one another with informal treachery. Senior civil servants, amongst them the appalling Simon (now Lord) McDonald of the Foreign Office and a comically snooty Sir Richard Heaton at the Justice Department, are past smug.
The individual Rory actually hates – hates, hates, hates – is his fellow Etonian Boris Johnson, who beat him to No 10.
And the individual Rory loves? Himself.
All memoirs are self-absorbed however Politics On The Edge is so egomaniacal it ought to develop into a psychology textbook. The level of the guide, Stewart writes, is to alert the nation to the deplorable situation of our physique politic. ‘Our Government and Parliament is now in a shameful state.’
His writer provides: ‘We all sense there is one thing profoundly damaged about our politics and Rory is the author to indicate us why.’
The first a part of that assertion is plain unsuitable. Some of us really feel that Parliament, regardless of its barnacles, is stronger than it was earlier than 2016. But Stewart is actually the good case research.
His petulance and disdain for vulgar democracy – he writes of ‘the day by day insolence of voters’ and he fought to dilute Brexit – are what introduced Westminster to its knees earlier than we lastly left the EU. Stewart claims to have been propelled by Europeanism however he writes comparatively little about the Leave v. Remain debate.
Before the referendum, he appeared unfazed. What spurred his subsequent Remoanerishness might merely have been his nakedly private rivalry with Johnson.
Stewart, son of an MI6 officer, toyed with changing into an ‘edgier type of diplomat, a thinker or a monk’ earlier than taking a tilt at politics. The finish function was ‘effecting basic change in our state and society’, although fairly what that change was, he doesn’t clarify.
‘For God’s sake do not develop into a Lib Dem,’ stated Paddy Ashdown, the nice Lib Dem swami. ‘Lib Dems get nothing performed.’ Labour was probably too sweatily meritocratic for refined Rory.
And so he wangled himself an interview with David Cameron, then chief of the opposition, and begged for a seat.
His pitch to Cameron was that ‘I cared. I did not wish to be wealthy or well-known. The solely factor that had ever actually motivated me since I used to be a small baby was the thought of public service.’ Never needed to be well-known! Rory is unattainable to dislike however, please, that declare is delusional.
The man is an elitist peacock, dropping names as freely as a potato lorry spilling spuds on a nation nook.
Governors, prime ministers, ambassadors, even a king, are all ‘outdated buddies’ they usually lend him a halo of significance past his actual achievements. He attends Bilderberg, which is like Davos however extra unique and secretive.
He drops names like a potato lorry spilling spuds
And he is susceptible to stunts, be it melodramatically whipping off his necktie in a TV studio – the daftest second but in any TV election debate – or occurring publicity-prone walks by way of Afghan deserts or by way of his Cumbrian constituency.
These will not be, by themselves, dangerous issues. As a parliamentary sketch author, I really like politicians who stand out from the boring crowd. But I do not need them laying declare to some sainted modesty.
His position mannequin was Michael Ignatieff, a media celeb and ‘public mental’ (an unlovely phrase Stewart likes) who grew to become a politician in Canada. ‘In politics, you earn your assist one handshake at a time,’ stated Ignatieff. Stewart was too impatient for that.
In his first conversations with Cameron, he demanded a ministerial future. No sooner had he been elected MP for Penrith and The Border than he began musing about changing into PM.
His guide mocks MPs for being careerist and abandoning their ideas however he himself was certainly one of the nodding donkeys who all the time crouched in the gangway at Prime Minister’s Questions, the higher to be seen on telly cheering hapless Mrs May.
Parliamentary politics is a workforce recreation imposed on solipsists. Most buckle down however Stewart thought he ought to be an exception.
Colleagues disliked his cockiness and one threatened to punch him after they disagreed over Iraq. Stewart claimed that an Iraq professional cited by the MP should be a no one as a result of Stewart had by no means heard of him.
Stewart doesn’t title the would-be nose-puncher nevertheless it was clearly North Wiltshire’s James Gray.
Last week, I requested Gray about the matter. The Middle East professional in query seems to have been Gray’s brother, who was head of the Foreign Office’s Middle East division at the time of the Iraq struggle. Not such a no one, in any case.
Stewart is a gifted mimic and skilfully sends up the likes of Michael Gove (a slipperiness that is virtually Gothic), Kwasi Kwarteng and Cameron’s zany concepts man Steve Hilton.
There is a good element about him arriving at the Culture Department to seek out that his predecessor as Minister, a lank-fringed Lib Dem, had left behind his plastic comb. The story is a tragi-comic capsule of ministerial pointlessness.
We study, too, of a cabal of senior civil servants referred to as ‘the small group’ who meet in secrecy to agree authorities coverage. Mandarins repeatedly are proven to treat elected Ministers as tumbleweeds.
One-to-one encounters include lengthy passages of direct citation. Unless Stewart made secret recordings, these should be invented.
How correct is the guide?
As the James Gray incident reveals, there are two sides to each story. Stewart brandishes the sword of fact – ‘the place of ethics in politics’, no much less. That, alongside with his europhilia and loathing of Boris Johnson, is why he is now each BBC lefty’s favourite ‘Tory’.
He denounces Johnson as a sloppy liar and a hazard to the nation. Fair sufficient. But anybody making such claims must suppose twice about forming a showbiz double-act with a infamous former New Labour boot-boy.
The guide, by the way, has fairly a few factual errors, minor however shocking. It’s virtually as if Stewart couldn’t be bothered to get different MPs’ constituencies proper. They’re simply little individuals, eh?
Colleagues dislike his cockiness – one threatened to punch him
David Cameron, who by no means trusted Stewart in politics, referred to as him ‘a trendy Julian Amery’. Stewart notes that Amery was ‘an unique determine from one other age, a pal of overseas potentates, on the unsuitable aspect of historical past over Suez’.
Ignatieff informed Stewart that he was seen as ‘a self-publicising adventurer, too useless and too naïve’. Some will say it is to Stewart’s credit score that he contains such feedback in his guide. Others might suspect he is doing so exactly in order that he can flip round and say ‘see how self-aware I’m’.
But is he?
He by no means grasps how a lot our nationwide curiosity was weakened by Remain MPs making an attempt to cease Brexit. Nor is there any recognition that his Boris complicated might have been fuelled by their similarities: each eloquent, each a little chaotic, each madly bold, each Etonian, and each, regrettably, now out of Parliament.
