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About the Author: Rory Stewart served in the UK Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development, and before that as Prisons Minister, Minister for Africa, Minister for Development and Minister for the Environment. Stewart is bitter, but - in contrast to much press reporting - not towards individuals but towards a broken political system, and his own romantic conception of it. Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow and inadequate our democracy and government had become. When it finished, I felt betrayed by the superficial way it had been formatted and produced by the BBC.
Politics on the Edge: A Memoir From Within Politics on the Edge: A Memoir From Within
Read by Rory, he has an effective and distinctive style and I liked his impressions of some of the main characters. Barely have they begun to get to grips with the role than they’re just as abruptly shunted off to another. In fact, much of The Abuse of Power is a similar exercise in self-styling as duty-bound, honest, fair, conscientious and co-operative.David Cameron was felled for misjudging the depth of Eurosceptic sentiment in the country; Theresa May at the hands of the DUP and the Brexiteers in her own ranks; Boris Johnson ultimately buckled under the weight of repeated scandal; Truss was ousted for her dalliances with economic lunacy; and Rishi Sunak – well, who is to say what fate awaits him? In it, she chronicles miserable episodes in the country’s recent history – hopping between the Hillsborough disaster, sex abuse scandals, Brexit and modern slavery. After a memoir of such blistering frankness, there is no way the Conservative party will have Stewart back. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal -- a journey described in The Places in Between. An interesting read, albeit unremarkable in overall content - especially for those whose have been listeners to ‘The Rest is Politics.
Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within - Goodreads
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. A party that can’t put Stewart in the ministry of defence but can put Truss in Number 10 shocks the sensibilities of the moderate centre. There is a crisis of seriousness in the Conservative party: an eschewal of expertise at the altar of political expediency, where blind loyalty is rewarded ahead of intellectual interrogation and principled public service. Rory Stewart, once a prime ministerial hopeful, was expelled from the party by text while receiving GQ magazine’s Politician of the Year award. This is, simply put, the best book I have ever read on British politics, and one of the best I've ever read on politics more broadly.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”. 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. He saw himself as championing the “big society” only to discover that Cameron’s stratagem was just a slogan. May – who ultimately resigned after three failed attempts to get her Brexit deal past her own colleagues – is one such victim.
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