Rory Stewart (Part 1)

Craig Oliver: Rory, it's very good to see you. How are you and where are you?
Rory Stewart: I'm very well. I'm in London about to fly to America, but I'm in London now. What are you doing in the States? So I'm about to start teaching at Yale University. I teach a seminar there, which is on something called grand strategy. So the integration of political, economic, and military strategy.
Craig Oliver: I want to start by going back to your childhood. It sounds to me from what I've read, that it was quite a rarefied atmosphere, or a lot of people might find that when they, they think of you. Is that right?
Rory Stewart: Gosh, my childhood rarefied atmosphere. Yeah, I don't know really. I mean, I guess I, I was born in Hong Kong.
I then moved back to London till I was six. Then my parents moved to Malaysia and I moved with them and then I was sent off to boarding school when I was eight and a half in Oxford and they remained in Hong Kong until I was 26. So I think I guess I had a sort of classic, one of these kind of British boarding school upbringings where really most of my life was defined by being at school nine months a year from the age of eight.
Craig Oliver: How do you feel about that looking back? A lot of people say that they found that quite difficult. Did you find it difficult or did you like boarding school?
Rory Stewart: No, I quite liked it. My parents were always complaining about this, that I always seemed very excited when I got on the plane from Malaysia and Hong Kong. I liked the food at school. I liked my friends at school.
Craig Oliver: And your father was a spymaster. And from reading about you, it's clear that he's had a massive impact on you. Tell us what he was like.
Rory Stewart: So he was a man who'd fought in the second world war. He'd been on the D Day beaches and was wounded just after D Day, had this huge gash out of his thigh. He was then a Malayan civil servant, sort of colonial officer in Malaya. And he kept going in, in Malaya, doing administration, so very much part of the British empire. And then he, as you say, joined the secret service. So he was our man in Vietnam during the Vietnam War and spent most of his time specializing in China.
He was, I guess, you know, very much living out the, I guess the sort of middle class dream of the 1940s. Very proud of his regiment, very proud of the queen, um, very proud of the, pretty proud of the British Empire, which is not a very, very fashionable thing to be.
Craig Oliver: Was he able to share with you what he was doing in any way?
Rory Stewart: Not the details of what he was doing as an intelligence officer, but an enormous amount of what he, of what he did as a colonial officer. I mean, I can, you know, I can bore you for hours about what he was trying to do in Penang and Malacca during the Malayan emergency and the schools that he built and his role as a magistrate and what he did in trying to deal with human trafficking or working with the Malaysian Chinese community on setting up a police force, that kind of stuff.
Craig Oliver: And what did he and your mother instil in you, do you think?
Rory Stewart: My father's big obsession wass being an all rounder. He loved the idea that he liked the idea of people being not just sort of scholarly, but also enjoying sport, being…he had this sort of idea of a kind of mini Renaissance man.
So he was always very excited at seeing me throwing myself at people's feet in rugby was one of his great delights in the world. My mother is a much more, I mean, she's highly intelligent, she was a university professor, she would read books to me, play chess with me, but she wasn't somebody who was trying to impose a particular vision.
Craig Oliver: And one of the things that people try to do is put, put people into boxes, I think. And one of the boxes that people put you into is being an Etonian. You're quite often sort of ribbed for that. Do you mind that? And can you see why it's an issue for people to put that label on you?
Rory Stewart: Oh, I can completely see why it's an issue. I mean, I think it's, it's more. It reveals quite a lot about Britain that we are still very, very interested in this. I mean, it's striking that there are many other people from privileged backgrounds who went to fancy private schools in public life. But we don't particularly notice in the same way that Rishi Sunak, you know, went to Winchester or Tony Blair went to Fettes.
This, this sort of school eaten has become a kind of symbolic part of Britain's continual obsession with, with class.
Craig Oliver: And do you, do you reject that? You think that's wrong, that people shouldn't be pointing out that you went to what school you went to?
Rory Stewart: I think it's fine to do that. I think, though, it can distract from many other inequalities in Britain. The huge inequalities between London and the South East and the North of the country. And the inequalities between the 60 percent of us who own houses and the 40 percent who don't, which is probably the most dramatic inequality in our country. So I think traditional social class, whether or not you, you know, in my friend Alistair Campbell's words, wear a pinky ring or speak with a posh accent, is not probably the most important type of inequality in Britain.
Craig Oliver: It's not a big deal for me, but I think a lot of people when they talk about it, say, you know, that there's something about Eton, the number of prime ministers that have come from there, this kind of sense of almost inculcating an idea that you're born to lead. I think that's what they worry about.
Rory Stewart: Yes I mean, I think the same is true probably of you know, the, the, these big schools in France. There's a very similar relationship between these big schools in France and the French political elite. I mean, it's an odd question. I mean, what, why do people go into public service? Why do they want to go into public service?
Why do most people not want to go into public service? I mean, 95 percent of the population doesn't want to be an MP, wouldn't consider being an MP. and many people from other, uh, expensive private schools choose to become bankers or lawyers or do whatever else they want to do with their life. So I think one of the interesting things about Eton is, is why is it so focused on encouraging people to be politicians?
Craig Oliver: And one of the things I read about, when you were thinking about what you wanted to do with your life, you said, I always wanted to try to live a life that would feel like a storybook. What do you mean by that?
Rory Stewart: I grew up reading books. Which were sort of romantic historical novels and taking them very literally. So I sort of thought almost that, you know, when I watched a James Bond movie or I watched an Indiana Jones movie, I could be one of those people. I wasn't very aware of the gap between what I was reading and what I could do. It seemed to me that if somebody could do something in a book, I could probably do it in real life.
And it took me some time to realize that maybe Indiana Jones' ability to swim off the top of a submarine might not be something that I was capable of doing.
Craig Oliver: Indiana Jones is like a fictional example, but Lawrence of Arabia is real, and there's other classical figures that actually existed that you've mentioned and compared yourself to a little. Is there a sense in which, you know, when you've had this long list of careers, that you kind of print the legend, don't you, in terms of these people? And looking at all your jobs, they're almost like they've come out of the pages of the storybook, like the tutor to a future King, soldier, diplomat, adventurer, philosopher, professor, politician, leader. Is it, is it sort of an overly romanticized view of things, or am I being unfair?
Rory Stewart: Well, I, think, it's certainly how it works for me. I mean, it's certainly how I viewed the world, and I don't know whether it's psychologically healthy or not. Jung, the great, you know, disciple of Freud and the psychiatrists, says that for human life to be bearable, you need to try to live out archetypes, that there has to be an element of living a sort of grander archetypal life, uh, and that that's just part of being human.
Now, I think I may do it in a slightly more literal minded sense, but I, I imagine he's right, that probably all of us, don't see our lives just in terms of the day to day of our jobs, but, but want to think about our lives as narratives or stories and feel probably disappointed or frustrated if the story of our life isn't quite what we wanted.
Craig Oliver: We've talked about this a lot on the podcast and we talked to James Graham, who's the playwright the other day, and he was talking about the importance of story and, you know, importance of using that to make sense, not just of your life, but of the world. But we also talked about the fact that in reality. There is just a point where things don't necessarily resolve easily or things aren't as clearly defined as you'd hoped and that part of life is basically learning to live with that and and work with that.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, for sure for sure and I think people who've lived their lives too much as a story, so you mentioned Lawrence of Arabia, for example, basically he achieves a storybook life by his late 20s and then he doesn't know what to do with the rest of his life.
He doesn't know what to do next. He's stuck for 20 years. Well, 15 years. Where he's kind of…one of the reasons he's folding blankets in a quartermaster's store and changing his name and becoming a private in the Air Force is that he can't think of anything in the modern world that can really form a sequence. And I guess it may be true for some professional footballers too. And it may be people in many professions that finding the second act is very difficult. And that's partly because pulling off the first act, whether as a footballer or as a, you know, a guerrilla leader, requires an enormous amount of luck.
But pulling off two successful acts is even more difficult. And it's one of the reasons why Arnold Schwarzenegger is so pleased with himself. He managed to pull off three of these things.
Craig Oliver: We could spend a lot of time talking about the many different roles and jobs that you've had. But we're going to focus a lot on your political career, and you've written a great book, Politics on the Edge.
I read it when it first came out, and I listened to it again just before doing this. And it's beautifully written, and I would say it's a must read for anybody who's interested in politics. But also about exactly what you're saying, about what happens when, you know, your hopes and aspirations confront reality.
First of all, I hear that Brad Pitt and Plan B have optioned the book. Is that true? And who should play you if that's true?
Rory Stewart: Well, so Brad Pitt and Plan B had optioned my life rights. Um, but that's, that's now simply faltering again. So he did briefly pay me for my life rights. And, um, my fantasy has always been Danny DeVito. That's the guy that I want to play me.
Craig Oliver: Danny DeVito. That's a good choice. He's maybe a bit old, but it's a good choice. Just to start going back to the book. Towards the end of it, and you're deciding to be running for the leadership of the Conservative Party, and there's a scene where you're going for a run with your wife Shoshana in the park.And you sort of glide over this bit a little bit, but she says to you, I don't think you like being a politician very much. And I think she kind of nailed it. Is that right?.
Rory Stewart: I think that is right. I think that is right. I think there's a big difference between politicians who like being politicians and politicians who don't. So George Osborne, for example, really enjoyed being a politician. Alistair Campbell, I think really enjoyed doing his job as director of communications. I think, I mean, he found it brutal and exhausting and, you know, very difficult for his, for him personally, but I think he enjoyed it. You know, Nicholas Soames, for example, is someone I know well, I think, really enjoyed being an MP, really misses it. I didn't. I found it a perpetually enraging process where I was just conscious all the time of how little we were achieving and how the huge gap between what we ought to be and what we actually were.
Craig Oliver: It felt to me that you were defining each stage of your political journey like a scene in an absurdist comedy.
For example, you say political parties are more interested in candidates who can protect leaflets from the rain, or open a letterbox without a dog taking their fingers off. And then, each stage again, you sort of list lots of people who appear to have lost their lives. the sense of what it's supposed to be about. Is it fair that you saw, that, am I right, that you saw it as a kind of absurd comedy at times?
Rory Stewart: Yes, I, I definitely did. I mean, I think it was…I think I've, I've seen a lot of things in life as surreal. Probably the best book I've read on warfare is Catch 22 which is a kind of absurdist drama. About the second world war I felt it when I was in Iraq and Afghanistan that so Much of what was happening was just mad and surreal and i've always felt that in british government that It's very difficult to communicate how much of a gap there is between the sort of rhetoric and the pretense of these organizations and the reality on the ground.
You know, my great example of this perhaps was Liz Truss when we were working together in Deferred, she was my boss in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She came in to see me and said, um, Rory, I want you to cut the budgets for national parks by 20 percent. And I said to the Secretary of State, that seems like a bad idea.
It'll make people very angry and it'll do a lot of damage. So she said, okay, Rory, for you, five percent. So I said, but if we only do five percent, probably best not to do it at all. And then she said, okay, Rory, for you, I won't cut it at all. And then she kind of pirouetted and left the room. And this was a sort of classic example for me of something I saw repeated again and again, which was a kind of profound lack of seriousness…that these people who were being promoted very fast, I mean Liz Truss was a darling of David Cameron, was made a junior minister by him very quickly, was put in the cabinet when she'd only been in four years, were not fundamentally interested in their portfolios. They weren't, she wasn't deeply interested in the national parks, she wasn't deeply interested in what the environment would look like in 20 or 30 years time.
She was interested in generating certain kinds of provocative soundbites which would play a game to get her promoted.
Craig Oliver: So you think she wasn't really interested in achieving very much other than the greater glorification of Liz Truss?
Rory Stewart: I think this is true for for many of the people that I was with. I don't think they were serious in the way that you would expect if you were kind of running a pizza business. You'd sort of expect the person to be, you know, maybe interested in pizzas and making delicious pizzas and giving people a good service. Politicians, I found, were very rarely profoundly interested in the portfolios they had.
They were put into these positions almost at random, largely in order to placate some part of the party. So it was probably completely random that Liz Truss had been made the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She didn't care much about environment. She denied, really, that rural affairs was even a thing. She probably wanted to have been made Secretary of State for Education. Later she told me that the one job that she completely despised and couldn't see the point of is being Foreign Secretary. She said she couldn't see the point of the Foreign Office. It was just boring. And then she was made Foreign Secretary.
So it's, it's really I think it's difficult, I mean you understand this because you've been right on the inside of this, but I don't think the outside really gets how Prime Ministers and the inner circles think when they promote these people, that they sort of imagine that maybe David Cameron has sat there and thought who on my bench really profoundly cares and understands about the environment and is going to make the British environment better in 20 years time than it is today. That is not the question he's asking when he's putting Liz Truss into that job.
Craig Oliver: It's so interesting because I've been a journalist and worked at the BBC. And was invited by David Cameron to come in and be his director of politics and communications. And it, the way I describe it to people was like being plucked from the riverbank and being thrown into whitewater rapids.
And in a system that I thought I could quite easily just get knocked about and bash my head on the rocks and drown. Because it was just so different to anything. I had ever experienced before and what was valued and needed was so different. So having a strategy was incredibly hard because you'd have to turn on a sixpence all the time or somebody would come in and just upend the apple cart by leaking something or that kind of thing.
And I suppose what I felt was up. I've I had to get used to this system in order to be effective in it
Rory Stewart: Yeah, and I think you did that with great kind of aplomb. But I mean you, you really were at the sharp end of it. I mean, I think maybe that the point is that politics is increasingly about communication. I mean, it's no accident that Alastair Campbell became a great celebrity or that you had a very central job. What I remember, is a conversation with David Cameron when he was about to go to Pakistan and he had written a speech and I'd looked at it and one of the questions he asked me when I tried to produce a redraft was where's this going to appear?
I didn't understand. What headline is it going to create? I mean, you know, is it going to be on page five of the Times? I mean, what is this? And I’m thinking, god, this is so weird. Because what I'm thinking about is the next 20 years of our relationship with Pakistan, I'm thinking about the audience in Pakistan and what influence can we have on British Pakistani relations. Not where does this thing land in the Times?
But you of course were much closer to what really consumes politicians, which is the sort of day to day…where are they in the BBC? Where are they in the Times? You know, what does and and somehow just getting media stories becomes an end in itself. So, you know when Liz Truss is saying I want a 10 point plan on the national parks in two days. She doesn't mean that she is interested in a brilliant set of thoughts about the national parks, she means she's got a slot in the telegraph that she's got a land somewhere.
Craig Oliver: So what I would, so what I would say is that when it's used, right, what people are trying to say is, what is the point of this? How, how is this going to be understood by people who are going to report on this? Because if they, it's not reported on, it's often not going to be heard.
So how are we sharpening our message to forward our strategic goals? I 100 percent agree with you, at some point over the last few years, it feels as if it's just become an end in itself and just getting coverage for coverage sake has been something that's happened and that there's been an obsession with campaigning over governing and that, I agree, it's gone too far and I think you probably experienced a bit more of that because we got chucked out after Brexit and at that point. It seemed to all get fast forwarded to that kind of behavior.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, I think it's, I think it was already bad. I think it was already bad when you guys were in and I think it then got much worse and probably it began going wrong with Tony Blair and onwards. It's, it's profoundly unserious. I mean, the cart is so far in front of the horse.
The cart of media coverage is so far in front of the horse of serious policy. Basically it creates a politics of. people with very short attention spans who can't be bothered to think deeply about policy. So I mean, I was very lucky in, the Ministry of Justice. I had a boss called David Gork, and I wanted to do two things.
One of them was to get rid of short sentences, so not send people to prison for, uh, sentences under six months. And the second one was to re nationalize the probation service, which had been privatized by Chris Groening. And I, sorry, and the third one was reducing violence in prisons. Now, all these things, I think, in most of the politics I saw with the bosses I'd had before, Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, I wouldn't have been able to do these things because they would have just asked, well, where's the media story in that? Where's the advantage for the Conservative Party? I mean, do the voters care about reducing violence in prisons?
So I was very lucky to have a boss who took absolutely at face value the fact that people were getting their eyes gouged out their jaws broken, somebody had been beheaded in the exercise grounds that our prisons were filthy drug ridden, disgusting, the windows were broken and that just it was just a complete disgrace. And that we had a moral obligation to sort this out. But my goodness our politics didn't encourage people to come up with solutions to that, which is one of the reasons why violence had tripled in the five years before I came into the job, because nobody cared.
Craig Oliver: I don't disagree with any of that. I suppose the thing that people, somebody, I imagine George Osborne in my head saying, Look, there's a bigger picture and ultimately we can't do anything unless we win and therefore we have to consider other things as well. So yes, you can do difficult things. But when you get to the stage of doing difficult things without communicating them effectively, that's when you start to lose.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think If these people were serious about doing difficult things while also winning, but you know I mean I've got a lot of time for George Osbourne last one. I think he's very smart and very effective, but I remember going to him and saying look I'm responsible for air pollution 26,000 people are dying prematurely a year in this country because of the nitrogen dioxide particle emissions These automobile manufacturers are literally breaking the law I mean, they're they're fixing the results out of these laboratories and and killing kids and here is an investment package which for not very much money could significantly reduce the number of people killed. And basically the answer was well Rory, you know, we're Conservatives. We don't really care about that issue and there's a sort of I don't know. I mean, maybe it's effective…
Craig Oliver: Do you think he was saying that? Or do you think he was actually really saying to you? You know, you're of course you're quite right and if you take this in isolation, it is a huge problem and ideally we do something about it. It's just there's what's important and there's what's urgent And the urgent things keep piling in and pushing what's important to the right so we can't do every important thing
Rory Stewart: Yeah and it may be that as a Chancellor, he's just responsible for unbelievable number of requests from everybody for money And he's just in the habit of poo pooing any new idea because he's got to try to protect his budget but certainly the tone was not, ‘Oh my god, Rory. That's a really serious issue. Let's sit down talk about that. Seriously. It's tragic I may not be able to do it quite as you want, but let's think constructively about how we can do something like it’
Craig Oliver: Yeah, it was fobbed off.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, it's an offhand joke That's what I got
Craig Oliver: And you paint a picture of a treadmill going nowhere a lot of the time and there's people jostling in an often thoughtless world voting for things they couldn't possibly fully understand and also I think you're incredibly self lacerating in the book. So the criticism isn't all aimed at others. You say the process made you coarser and more sycophantic. Why did that happen? Do you think?
Rory Stewart: Well,I think I realized that in order to get promoted I mean, you know, and I wanted to be promoted because the One of the fundamental reasons you go into politics is to change things and to change things you need power You need the power to change things and that means becoming a minister and you know, I had david willett's Saying to me this is what he called a mephistophelian bargain.
It's it's promotion in exchange for loyalty. And other people saying to me, frankly, the reason I got a job is I sent creepy texts to David Cameron and to his chief of staff all the way through, and I pushed and bullied them until I got a job. And so, I began to play that game, and I felt horrible doing it.
Because, for the first time in my life, I really felt, look, this I'm not remotely being promoted on my merits. You know, I'd spent, I don't know,10 15 years working on the Middle Eastern Asia, I spoke three Asian languages, I'd you know, being on the Foreign Affairs Committee, I've been on the Defence Committee and in the end they, the first job they give me is Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. So it's nothing to do with my skill set or it's to do with the fact that I'm a squeaky wheel who's, um, who in the end they sort of feel they sort of owe something to.
Craig Oliver: And at each stage of the process, it seems to me you describe yourself as being bamboozled, frustrated, and then in despair. And the word that kept jumping out of the book for me is shame. So, you say that ultimately that that was your feeling when you left politics, you felt shame. And then you describe also about going into politics and say, only by becoming an MP could I set about changing what's shameful about British policy at home and abroad. And later then when running for leader you again say, you know, ‘I feel just shame at what's going on in my country and my inability to do anything about it’. That word is, it's such a big word shame.
I'm just interested in you reflecting on why It's so prominent at different stages in in what was going on for you
Rory Stewart: Yeah, it's, it's a word that really carries a lot. I remember Tessa Jowell, the Labour minister, saying that the question she asked herself when she went to visit a hospital was, would I put my mother in this hospital?
And I thought that was such an important way of thinking about the world. You know, would I put my brother in this prison? Am I proud of what a country, you know, what a visitor to Britain would think if they saw the state of this country and the way that we were running ourselves? Am I proud to be in this prime minister's questions and see how these people, am I proud of my colleagues?
Do I think we're serious enough? And I, I, you're right. It was my driving sense was one of real shame. I came in with an idea of how I think government ought to be, ought to operate, and the reality was so shockingly different. I mean, so much worse. You know, I'd been briefly in the army, I'd been a diplomat in the Foreign Office.
I'd worked for NGOs. I've worked for universities. I mean, I'd never seen anything as bad. This was, I mean, a far, far worse…
Craig Oliver: But why did you feel shame about it? I get that you, you feel that there's, it is, there's shame in some of the inequalities and problems. But why did you ultimately feel shame? What did you…you felt that you'd failed?
Rory Stewart: Yeah, yeah, I was part of the system. You know, I was, I was quite rightly being held up by the public to blame for the mess for a war in Afghanistan where we had quite literally invaded the country. Spent billions of pounds and left and ultimately just handed the country back to the Taliban again. I mean, that's pretty shameful the consequences of austerity the lack of real sustained productivity growth the shocking state of our public services The arrogance of our politicians and I was part of this. I mean, I you know, I, totally failed to turn these things around and…
Craig Oliver: It would have been a hell of a thing for you alone to have done that and that you were a voice that was out there and you were making changes and differences, you know At each of the departments, actually, you did have an impact in, in some ways that was for the positive and, and that you were a voice saying that we can do things differently.
Surely you can't expect yourself to have just turned the whole system on its head just by yourself.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, I think that's a good challenge. And I think somebody, again, said something which I thought was very interesting recently, which is that politics is not really, and this is, I think it's a point about Mary Beard made about power, power isn't about being able to say, This is what's going to happen and everyone doing what you want.
Power is about the right to be heard, having an influence, being in the room, having a chance to try to make your case. And that, there's an element of humility in politics in realizing that that's all you can hope for. A chance to be heard, and nine times out of ten, for very complicated reasons, you won't be heard.
And sometimes very frustratingly, you may be right, and you won't be heard.

Rory Stewart (part 2)

Craig Oliver: When I was reading the book and feeling you being so self lacerating, I sometimes wanted you to, you know, just at least say to yourself, look, I am trying here and I am pushing and I am of sometimes a lone voice and that is making a difference in some way.
I had a conversation this morning actually with Amber Rudd, who's also been on this podcast before, and she said she loved the book as I did, thought it was a great book about politics.But the one thing that we ended up discussing was is there a danger that it comes across as so negative that you end up putting off people like you from trying?
Rory Stewart: Yeah, I think there is a danger of that. I mean, I think that it's there's a there's a lovely line, it was C. S. Lewis, the guy that wrote the Narnia books Says that it's very tempting to try to be optimistic and hopeful and to tell people what he calls children's stories, nice comforting stories.
To actually achieve change, you have to be brutal about what's wrong. I mean, fundamentally, You've got to confront it. And, and I think, you know, Amber's response is also the response to my friend Nicholas Soames. They're just like, oh, it's too depressing. I mean, he's just saying everything's wrong. This is, and of course because they quite enjoyed being politicians, they don't really want to see it like that.
But I think if we're gonna change the system, we have to really dig into what's wrong, not try to tell ourselves happy stories. I mean, of course there are, you know, you can tell some happy stories. Let's take a completely absurd example. You know people during the First World War kept saying, you know, you can't describe how bad this war is because we got to recruit young people to go and fight in the army right and that people seem to be Saying, you know, you can't actually say what it's like in politics because you've got to encourage people to become MPs.
I had the same during Covid what I was saying in beginning of February 2020, look, the government is really screwing up their Covid policy…I had a lot of people calling me saying you can't say this, you know, you're undermining confidence in the government, you're being unfair to Matt Hancock and Chris Whitty and Boris Johnson, all these people, and you're…but I think you've got to do it. It was the same when I was criticizing Iraq and Afghanistan. The basic view when I was saying, this is a humiliating mess, you're completely wasting your time in Helmand, you've no idea what you're doing, is, oh, well, that's just Rory, you know, he's a bit eccentric, he's very negative, he's always so critical, he's gone a bit native.
And in retrospect, I think I was right. I think what we were doing in Afghanistan made no sense at all. But that isn't the way that David Cameron viewed it, or Amber would have viewed it, or Nicholas Soames would have viewed it. They all would have said, well, it's not that bad, Rory. I'm sure, you know, the government and the military know what they're doing, I don't know why you're being so negative. And so I think you've just got to try to tell it as you see it. And I'm very open to the possibility that there are heroes out there.
But sadly, my heroes, who are people like David Gork, who should be leaders the party nobody's ever heard of because we operate in a system that somehow gives Liz Truss, Priti Patel, much more airtime than we give the serious people like David Gauke.
Craig Oliver: He's definitely a great politician that you're right is not known as well as he should do. I want to move on a bit to your experience of being an MP and a minister. And there's a moment in the book that really struck me when you were speaking to a journalist from the Scottish Sun. And you talk about what it's like in your constituency. And you say that there are farmers in your constituency that are living in quite primitive conditions and still holding their trousers up with twine.
And the story appears a few days later, and you get absolutely pilloried for it. And you say how depressed you were by that experience, and that even you went as far as for the first time in life considering killing yourself. Can you just explain why that was such a big deal for you?
Rory Stewart: Yes. I thought that, um, that an MP's relationship with constituents is sort of almost sacred. That you have an obligation of confidentiality towards them. You've got an incredible trust. They voted for you. You're trying to represent them all regardless whether they vote for you or not and that you need to show them deep, deep respect. That you can't be taking them for granted. Then here in this article I appeared to have been caught out basically sneering at my constituents and I just felt awful. I mean, I felt I totally sort of betrayed them. I'd betrayed them. I'd betrayed myself. I'd ruined my career, I'd never be able to sort of look anyone in the eye again. It seemed like such a sort of fatal thing um, and yet, uh As you say, with distance, it was quite a small thing. And it was probably something that the journalists, right, in the Scottish town just thought was quite funny.
And probably the BBC journalist interviewing me saying, ‘Will you resign?’ probably didn't really mean that I was going to resign.
In fact, I probably should have turned around and said, ‘What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, should I resign? You know, why should I resign? What are you talking about?’ But I didn't quite have the confidence to do that. And I think that, that, that suggests a real fragility about me.
Craig Oliver: And I think what's really interesting about it is that only through experience, do you realize that, you know, this is going to pass. And that at the time, it feels like the biggest thing ever because you're so close to it. But as it disappears into the rear view mirror, you get much more perspective on it.
Rory Stewart: Absolutely. And of course, political life is full of those things, and one of the things that defines people like Grant Shapps, or Gavin Williamson, or Priti Patel, is their ability to bounce back, endlessly. You know, to go through scandals that would basically make me want to hide under a rock, and be fired, and be disgraced, and be all over the front page of newspapers, and then cheerfully come back again.
Craig Oliver: So that's true, I think there is a brand of politician that almost They don't feel it. Do they? It's as if it all just bounces off. But I also think that there's quite a lot of other politicians who are much more like you and I experienced them, who just basically make a mistake and what's interesting is that in the ,edia and the political environment. that that mistake will be magnified, amplified, blown up and used to beat you with for a very, very long time.
And that seems to me to be another problem with our politics is that there's quite a lot of decent people who often do say something that's just a bit off color or get something wrong.And yet they get completely flayed for it. And it's quite disingenuous, a lot of the criticism that follows from it.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, and it's often part of the problem, of course, is that you're often in trouble for making jokes or trying to, I think the sense of humour gets you in trouble, trying to generalize, trying to speak quickly, and of course, as a politician, you're speaking all the time.
So you're and you can take two approaches that you can take the super cautious approach where you just recite the government line. And one of the reasons I think Liz Truss was loved and Priti Patel was loved is that they would literally take whatever line you, Craig, gave them and just repeat ‘the long term economic plan is working’ until they were purple in the face, nine times in an interview.
Or you go to the other extreme which is a sort of Donald Trump extreme, which is that you just cause outrage and scandal every minute, Boris Johnson did quite a lot of this, and lean in the other way. The problem is, can you find a middle ground of actually communicating thoughtfully honestly thinking on your feet? Without getting yourself in trouble and without becoming shameless.
Craig Oliver: Yeah, and I don't want to push it too far because it's deeply personal to you, but when you had those thoughts of, ‘I just want to end it’...did you manage to talk to somebody about it or did it just go quickly?
Rory Stewart: Um, that's I, I was very, so as you say, I, I thought about killing myself and it was a very shocking to realize that for the first time in my life I was thinking about this. And I, I, it's difficult to put together what, what happened over the next two days. Is it that I just recovered or I began to find other things, but somehow I got myself back into a mindset of saying, well, why don't we just keep going for a bit. Maybe everything isn't over, maybe we'll just….and actually it was very helpful to me that, you know, constituents reached out and made a joke out of it. People would come and meet me in Westminster Hall and they'd made belts out of binder twine that they'd give me or and I began to realize that maybe It wasn't as bad as I thought.
Craig Oliver: We spoke to the Reverend Richard Coles and his thing was that when he had been in those moments, the thing is just to keep going and that actually things turn up, things happen, and it helps you with perspective and it's almost like having that little voice in your head, that's just like just keep going. Just keep going, I'll get through this, it'll pass.
Rory Stewart: It's left me with a very very strong sense of empathy and concern for people who go through bits of public disgrace, you know when I see People being forced to resign from the BBC or from universities or from the church Sometimes without really knowing as an outsider what they've really done and maybe they've done terrible things But my primary thought is usually kind of deep deep sympathy for them. Just how horrible it is.
Craig Oliver: Yeah, it's almost like hate the sin, love the sinner type thing, isn't it? It's understanding what somebody is going through often is deeply painful and difficult. And what I experienced, actually often having had to deal with a lot of people who are maybe in scandals, was that they felt that a lot of the mitigation and the color around it was often missed out and they ended up just being painted in very, very stark terms.
Rory Stewart: Well, the classic one who I think you know you really dealt with a lot on this and who remained very angry for a very long time was Andrew Mitchell who felt that his you know…this was the Plebgate thing, where he'd got in a fight with a policeman at the gate. And he said that he hadn't called them Plebs and they said he had and he really felt wrung out to dry.
I mean one of the things that actually was a problem for people running against Boris Johnson is that a loss of these politicians who backed Boris Johnson early Gavin Williamson, Grant Shapps, Andrew Mitchell were all people who had been forced to resign in scandals under previous Prime Ministers under David Cameron or Theresa May. Priti Patel was another one…people who carried a lot of anger with them and thought that Boris Johnson was the sort of person who'd sort of forgive them and rehabilitate them.
Craig Oliver: I want to talk a bit about leadership now and you described being a candidate for the Conservative leadership after the demise of Theresa May. And a sentence really stuck, struck me. You said, ‘we are trapeze artists stretching for holds on rusty equipment over fatal depths, a slip is easy.’ And I, I guess that fits in a bit with what you're saying, is how awkward and how difficult it is for people putting themselves up into these positions, because it's full of rusty equipment that's falling apart and all very difficult.
But I suppose the flip side of that is that those people, and possibly including you at that time, perpetuate these myths that you can change everything and that there are big bold things that you will do and suddenly everything will be transformed when in reality, that's not really very likely at all.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I mean, I think populism is the extreme version of this, but I think normal democratic retail politics obviously involves making endless confident promises about a world that is very, very intractable and tough. You know, I was being attacked in a review recently because in the book I say that I couldn't understand why David Cameron made all these promises on immigration when he must have known perfectly well that he couldn't achieve them, right?
He wouldn't be able to get immigration down below hundreds of thousands and the reviewer said, you know that reveals so much about Rory's kind of cynicism and lack of energy that he just sort of assumes that this thing can't be done. Because what the review is looking for and what the voters are looking for is is somebody who says, ‘I am going to sort this out. I am going to stop the boats’.
Craig Oliver: So I think this is really interesting. So I don't want to be David Cameron's spokesman in this. You know, I stopped doing that quite a long time ago. Unfortunately, I don't have to do his PR anymore. But…
Rory Stewart: You did spend five years doing it, didn't you?
Craig Oliver: I did. Yeah. No, I spent nearly, nearly six years doing it. But I suppose what I would say to you is that having been very close to him at that time. I think he felt it was his duty to respond to what was the number one concern of the British public. And I think he genuinely believed, I mean, looking back it's absolutely absurd, but I think he genuinely believed that if the full weight of the British government was put behind this we could reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.
Now patently that was wrong, but I genuinely don't think he said it knowing it was wrong. I think he thought he could achieve it and just massively underestimated the scale of the problem and the ability of the government to deal with it.
Rory Stewart: Well, my assumption about politicians is that they're not really describing reality at all when they make these statements. They're largely making communications gestures. So when, uh, they say, you know, in Afghanistan, they say every Afghan is committed to a gender sensitive, multi ethnic centralized state based on democracy, human rights, and rule of law….I'm, you're tempted at listening to that to think, is this person naive or are they lying?
Right? I mean, do they have any no idea about Afghanistan or do they know about it and are just fibbing? But I realized later that it's neither of those things. They're not actually thinking very hard about Afghanistan. If you said to them what's your evidence? What do you mean? Every Afghan believes in a gender sensitive multi ethnic centralized state ... .obviously, they don't, they'd be a bit sort of… hurt.
And I think the same may be true, this is being a little unfair, but to some extent I think David Cameron begins by saying I'm going to reduce net migration to tens of thousands because that's what he feels needs to be said politically because that's what the public wants him to say. And he doesn't spend much time before he says it wondering about whether it can actually be done or how the system works or why we have hundreds of thousands people coming in. And it’s the same with Afghanistan, that they don't really sit there and say ‘okay, what do I know about Afghanistan? Have I really mastered this subject? Have I really gotten to the policy of this?’
Craig Oliver: And I think you're absolutely a hundred percent right, but isn't the danger that you're saying ‘Everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ and yet we have a system where there is a prime minister who's trying to spin thousands of plates.
And what was interesting is it's pretty clear, is you don't like David Cameron in the book - and that's absolutely fine, I'm not gonna argue the toss with you about that - but towards the end you kind of having experienced Liz and Boris as well you sort of say I kind of get that actually he was a lot better than I thought he was at the time and it was all a bit harder than I perhaps realized.
Rory Stewart: Yes, that's absolutely true. I mean, I you know, I think when I looked back on it, he was in the end somebody who didn't deliberately mislead Parliament, had some sense of prime ministerial dignity, which Boris Johnson didn't have. He didn't pursue the kind of reckless economic policies of distrust. He was thoughtful and collegial with the civil service. He didn't ramp up massive populism. He was broadly prudent, you know, thoughtful and careful and I think that's why he backed Remain. I liked his instincts on gay marriage, on climate, on international development.
Craig Oliver: You think he was a bit glib, though, that it was broad brushstrokes, not enough attention to detail.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, I think he wasn't serious. He wasn't profoundly serious. I think he was good at chairing meetings, he was good at coming up with nice, slick conclusions to meetings. He was good at communicating in the media. But he basically was impatient with earnest serious, people. I felt this on Foreign Affairs and I suspect if you were… I don't know Greg Clark or David Willetts… or any of these kind of people you probably felt it in your areas too. I suspect Michael Gove probably felt it when he was moved on from education. He was somebody who liked breezy confident people who didn't cause trouble for him and that's why he quite sort responded to the Liz Truss’ and the Priti Patels.
I think he had far too many old Etonians around him. I don't think he was genuinely, um, open to people from diverse backgrounds really challenging him.
Craig Oliver: It's certainly true that when I joined and that there was a big deal made out of me having been to a comprehensive school as if this somehow was an amazing thing….other than it being a straightforward thing.
I want to flick on very, very quickly to the other Prime Ministers. You're very sympathetic to Theresa May and treat her as a figure of pity, but she was somebody that also said, a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere. And it seems to me, if you are anything, you are a citizen of the world.
Rory Stewart: I think that was really damaging. And I think put back her cause by a long way and made it much more difficult to get Remain voters to get Brexit deal, which was a tragedy because I think her deal, which was basically leaving Britain in the Customs Union, would have been a far better solution. for Britain, for the UK economy, for Europe. So that was a terrible misstep, but I think she was profoundly serious. She had a strong sense of public service. She absolutely wanted to listen and get into the details of things.
Craig Oliver: So it's so, so interesting. And this is what I, again, I don't. bear her any ill will. I felt that when we were looking at Brexit, we thought, who is going to be our champion in the Cabinet? We went through all of the Cabinet positions on Europe, and she, by a country mile, was the most pro European of the Cabinet. But when it came to the campaign, she just hid. And then when she did come out, she said the most unhelpful things she possibly could. So it's just so, it's interesting to me that, that my experience of her when I wasn't in the camp and had been kicked out was negative.But your experience when you were in the camp was positive. Is there a danger that we give too much credit to the people that we're with?
Rory Stewart: I'm sure there's a huge danger. I think that's a really good corrective. And I think politicians probably behave in a different way on their way up to the way that they're there. And that might have been a moment where she recognized that this was her great opportunity. To be Prime Minister and of course she was vindicated and I think and that's politics, isn't it?
Craig Oliver: Yeah, politicians are very ambitious. I want to flick on to the next prime minister here Liz Truss she seems to me, even with Boris, to be the greatest exemplar of what we're talking about in terms of what's wrong with politics.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, I mean she is a completely bizarre figure I mean, completely bizarre. I mean, actually, I'd like to know your view on this. I mean, I remember challenging someone in Cameron's inner circle about why on earth he'd made her a Junior Minister and then made her a Secretary of State, you know, when she's only been in office for four years. And the answer was, she's a really strong media performer and I couldn't even understand that I mean, she seems to be unbelievably wooden.
Craig Oliver: My memories of Liz Truss when I was in number 10 were…not much really. She seemed to be perfectly affable, capable, in the sense that, you know, wanted to be helpful, wanted to find ways to do things, seemed to be spoken of as being effective in, in her department. What's happened since then seems to me that almost, that, that every fault and flaw in her seems to have been magnified and amplified and blown up. And I don't know if it was always there or if she went on a massive journey that suddenly turned her into this kind of massively popular figure?
Rory Stewart: It was very weird. It was always there I mean, she was the most terrible Secretary of State. Yes. I mean any civil servant in that department Would have been able to warn people years in advance, you know I told you the anecdote about her trying to cut the National Park's budget I mean, but also just the way in which she ran meetings.
She would come in and you know she kept trying to get us to rewrite a 25 year environment plan and every time we produced it she'd say, ‘Oh, that's not what I want’. And eventually I said, you know, about the fourth iteration. ‘What is it you don't like about this? And you know, is it that you want to change the font? Do you want more pictures? Is it you want more on water and less on air? I mean, what is it that you don't want? You don't like?’ And she just said,’ Oh, I'll, I'll know it when I see it.’
I mean, that's not management. That's laziness, but and I think what she was but but her trick was to convince number 10 that she was effective because she was outspoken and sounded sort of dynamic when she talked. It's
Craig Oliver: It’s so interesting because I felt standing outside that, when Theresa May was made Prime Minister, I think the Conservative party knew that she was socially awkward, struggled to make decisions and was rather brittle and I thought we knew that Liz Truss was a lightweight. And we certainly knew that Boris was somebody who was chaotic and had a difficult relationship with the truth.
And as we're talking about Boris, where do you think he is on the spectrum between bumbling fool and complete Machiavellian person who knows exactly what he's doing?
Rory Stewart: I think that he has an incredibly ruthless idea of, of success. And although he's amiable, and doesn't, he's not unpleasant to people, person to person, and that's one of his great tricks, and he's very good at sort of being socially adept, and making people laugh, and being forgiven for his flaws.
In the end, what he really cares about is Boris, and it's morally, he's defined by an immense selfishness and an immense carelessness. He doesn't really care about the consequences. He doesn't take things seriously.
Craig Oliver: So I don't disagree with any of that. But I suppose the question I have is, nobody really doubted a lot of that and yet he still became leader of the Conservative party and as Prime Minister won a majority of well over 80. Why is it that even though we could see him and he was in plain sight?
Rory Stewart: Well, I think this is about the age of populism. It's about people feeling that the system is so broken that they want to throw a hand grenade into the middle of it.I mean the trick with Boris Johnson or Donald Trump or Bolsonaro in Brazil or Milei in Argentina, is that people vote for them because they really think they're all as bad as each other I mean Boris Johnson actually sort of is explicit about this. He says ‘My trick is that the public think that all politicians are schmucks, and I'm just different because I'm the one who's most openly admits to being a schmuck.’
So basically if they vote for Boris Johnson, they think here's not really any difference between him and a sort of serious, thoughtful, careful politician. Because they don't believe there are serious, thoughtful, careful politicians. They think any politician who tries to portray themselves as kind of, um, I don't know, serious and thoughtful and talking about complications is just bullshitting them.
And the great thing about Boris is he's going to go in and he's just going to blow the thing up. And because they like the sense of the sort of lord of misrule, the kind of anarchic clown who's going to come in and turn the whole thing on its head. But you only get that if you've absolutely lost any respect for institutions or structures…you only put the clown onto the stage in the circus if you really don't give a shit about what's happens to all the ladders and the pail of water and everything that's on the stage
Craig Oliver: We've just been talking about a series of PrimeMinisters there and the one thing that they all have in common is that they went down in flames. Their political careers and ended in tears or that or as Prime Minister ended as in tears I'm interested in reflecting on loss and failure with you. Let's take some specific examples. You had, you were in the final debate to be leader of the Conservative Party and it was brutal.
It felt like you had a chance and then it evaporated in the space of that hour or so. And afterwards, somebody described you as ‘a bit of roadkill still twitching that needed to be put out of its misery’, which is just an extraordinarily lacking in empathy, a brutal thing that moment of feeling that…you were close, but then it all blew up and you lost and it evaporated and went through your fingers Just describe that and your feelings at that time.
Rory Stewart: Yeah, I mean it was terrible because of course I'd built it up so that it wasn't just about trying to be leader of the Conservative Party. It was about trying to block a hard Brexit, which I care deeply, deeply about. Trying to bring the country together when I thought it was very divided. Trying to find a middle ground between Remain voters and Brexit voters.
And trying to stop Boris Johnson from becoming Prime Minister, who I thought would be damaging for the country, but I also thought would be the beginning of the Conservative Party's lurch to the right. And you know, a terrible problem for British politics. So, the stakes to me seemed very, very high and my, I had also developed an idea of Britain where I thought they're not going to vote for this guy, Boris Johnson, they won't. In the end, this is a country of common sense, of moderation, of compromise. You know, we always do the right thing in the end, and the right thing, obviously, is not this. So, losing was my feeling an incredible sense of personal failure. Now, how did I manage to let this happen? How did I not manage to beat this guy?
Given everything, as you say, that we knew about him and given how toxic he was gonna be so it was no it was terrible and I retreated into an 11 day silent retreat and could barely concentrate. I mean I'd done a retreat three years earlier where I found it very easy to meditate and I'd loved meditating 12 hours a day in silence and suddenly I was finding myself basically consumed by weird forms of rage against, not just Boris Johnson, but particularly against my colleagues. The sort of Robert Bucklands, Robert Jenricks, Rishi Sunak's, Oliver Dowdens, who came out and endorsed him at the critical moments and helped him through.
Craig Oliver: David Cameron said to me that, you know, Boris Johnson was like, that the affair that the Conservative Party had to have, they knew he was a Roman, but they still fancied him, and that they were going to go through that kind of experience despite it.
It's quite a crude way of putting it, but that feels about right to me. And for somebody like you the moderate, liberal, Conservative, that I have a lot more sympathy for to come through, would have been a phenomenal achievement in those circumstances.
Rory Stewart: Yes, yeah, no, you're right. And I guess, um, but I suppose when you're running to be leader, you have to believe that you can do it.
I mean, you're right. I mean, in retrospect, and probably even before I ran, obviously the odds were strongly against, and that's presumably why the candidate that I wanted to run, which was Amber Rudd, didn't run because she could see that it wasn't doable. I felt that with Amber not running, with David Gauke not being prepared to run, with Nicky Morgan not being prepared to run, somebody needed to try to run for the One Nation side of the Conservatives. I just couldn't quite believe that we couldn't do it.
Craig Oliver: There's another moment which you describe in the book, which really impacted me as well, is when you're leaving the foreign office and some of your father's possessions and pottery, I think it was that he'd had, it got nicked from, from the foreign office and nobody seemed to care.
The fact that it had just been lifted and a sign that you had put up that said Africa had been taken down and for you to take away. And, again, you feel very low because these are all, it feels to you like they're symbols, that this is all just degrading, evaporating, going wrong.
And what I thought was interesting about that was it reminded me of Barack Obama in his autobiography where he's in, he's in Egypt and he looks at an ancient monument and it makes him think, look, everything I do will go. You know, even if I have a landmark achievement. In 10, 15, 100 years, it will all be gone, it will evaporate, um, and I will be gone. And I just wondered if you were able to get that kind of perspective on things, that actually in reality part of life is coming to terms with the fact that ultimately there's a limited impact you can have and you aren't going to be some mythical figure that changes the world.
Rory Stewart: That, that is right. I think in the end it all goes, but it's also important as a politician to be very focused to motivate yourself, not only to be thinking about, you know, Barack Obama looking at pyramids and in 2000 years time, you have to believe this, the stakes of stopping a hard Brexit really matter.
Craig Oliver: Yes. And I think that that's the thing is like, can you make a difference now, but also can you have a healthy perspective on you know, what your role is and what you're capable of.
We're coming to the end of our time and you've been incredibly generous and thank you for that. But the question we always ask at the end of it all is if there was one piece of wisdom that you would pass on, what would yours be?
Rory Stewart: I mean, so I think just very quickly as a preface, I mean, I'd say that I'm doubtful about having wisdom. I mean, I love a line from T. S. Eliot where he says the only wisdom is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless. In, in a context in which he's very kind of suspicious of the idea of older people having some amazing secrets.
But, I suppose that idea that power, which I'm nicking from Mary Beer, that power is in the end about having the, being listened to, being heard, not about being able to make your will apparent, I think is important, and I think there's a good sense of humility in that.