Politics On the Edge: The instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller from the host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics

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Along the way there were compensations. Stewart enjoyed being a constituency MP. He writes with lyrical fondness about Cumbria and its rustic voters. Surprisingly, he relished his time as prisons minister, managing to reduce drug and violence figures in 10 jails. He got better at politics, and at overcoming the inertia of civil servants. They tended to view ministers as ignorant and ephemeral and often spoke in corporate jargon. His warnings about Johnson – the politician and the man – were right. This political memoir is sui generis. Even the title betrays the contradictions of the work: Stewart is at once "on the edge" and "within". Rory Stewart has always made a virtue of his vulnerable transparency. He once asked a Financial Times profiler "do you think I should be prime minister?", and, while he is often consciously self-mythologising, he never recites false myth. Where, for example, Boris Johnson slaves to belie his true self, Rory Stewart slaves to announce his (or at least, his own conception of it). This makes the book utterly revealing and at times unsettling, and there are two narratives which both reveal and unsettle within. Rory Stewart interview: ‘I fought an existential fight against Boris Johnson, who is a terrible human being’ ]

Another unusual aspect is that Stewart often declines to mention names, thus suggesting a veneer of discretion, but gives you enough hints that anyone with access to a search engine or Wikipedia could probably work out who he is referring to. This faux anonymity is a bit annoying, as it doesn’t seem to achieve anything, and anyone who Stewart despises gets named repeatedly (primarily Boris Johnson). It is hard to disagree with any of Stewart’s conclusions, about the dire state of our politics, and the strange and empty character of its representatives. I was left wondering if he would have had a less bruising time as a Labour MP. In 2019 Johnson purged leading remainers and Stewart quit both the Tories and his seat. Last year he reinvented himself as one half of a hugely successful current affairs podcast, The Rest Is Politics, co-hosted with Alastair Campbell.All of which makes for a superbly readable book. After his unexpected 2015 election victory, Cameron made Stewart a junior environment minister, serving under Liz Truss. Truss prized “exaggerated simplicity” above “critical thinking”, “power and manipulation” over “truth and reason”. Stewart observes that this “new politics” offered “untethered hope” and “vagueness” instead of accuracy. Truss was allergic to “caution and detail”, he adds. Long passages in this chapter advocate for all the merits of the agreement – its sensitivity to Ireland, its best-of-both-worlds problem-solving. I find it convincing now as I found it convincing then. But her abject failure to interrogate, deeply, why Remainers and Leavers alike didn’t see promise in her arrangement is telling. She thinks they crashed her deal just “because they could” without considering that anyone might have good reason to. Nobody expected a move into politics. Certainly not Conservative politics. Least of all Rory Stewart. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today.

How do you feel, about the other parts of the job,’ John persisted, ‘now that you have real power? It’s a drug, isn’t it, power? I bet you’re glad now you didn’t give up on being an MP.’ The first is the narrative about the British political system. It is genuinely enlightening to be introduced to the various byzantine structures that a politician must navigate through the raw eyes of a naive first-timer: the party machine (whips, wannabe grandees & the PM inclusive), the British press, and the Civil Service. The first impressions are laughable and absurd. After twenty chapters, it becomes hard to laugh. But the overall narrative seems to be that no one is really in charge, and no one is interested in taking charge. No one is concerned about the details, except for all the people too concerned with the details. Yes, Minister prefigured this by forty years, but it is harder to swallow when you realise that it really, really is true. The most comically dark passage is Stewart's determination to cease funding to north-west Syria, for fear that the UK government is inadvertently cashing up members of al-Qaeda. Months of flying Bond-like around the world to find out who truly possesses the authority to cut the program leaves him with no answers. He had been told that the decision had to come, variously, from him, from the secretary of state, from the prime minister, from MI5 or MI6, from the NSC, from Cabinet, from the senior civil servants within his department, from the embassy on the ground, from the foreign secretary, even from the American president. Despite all this, the funding never stops. That is, until months later when Stewart was proved entirely correct: Britain had been sending money that ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda. As soon as bad press was on the horizon, the funding stopped... When Stewart talks of political communication rather than decision making, someone like Baudrillard would find himself surprised precisely never. Discussions about policy have been hollowed out by a party machine obsessed with shaping the narrative, a fourth estate obsessed with misrepresenting it, and a constituency of voters obsessed with ignoring it. DAVID CAMERON, Boris Johnson, and Rory Stewart were all educated at Eton and Oxford. Two became Prime Ministers; one did not. Already an acclaimed author, Stewart (Features, 3 November) — with ruthless honesty, not least about himself — describes his nine years in Parliament, concluding with the débâcle of the second television debate that led to his elimination from the chance to challenge Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party. It is both a riveting and painful read, which, frankly, exposes the glaring inadequacies of the dysfunctional way in which Britain is governed. These days Stewart leads a non-profit organisation that gives cash handouts to the poor of East Africa, and, with Alastair Campbell, co-hosts every centrist dad’s favourite podcast, The Rest is Politics. He has also, however, found time to write this memoir, Politics on the Edge: the story of his 10 years as a Tory MP. It’s very good. Even so, I’m not sure I should recommend it. This is because it casts such a depressing light on Westminster that it may put the reader off voting ever again. That does not mean he is always an excellent administrator or that I would believe he was a great minister - a lot of the initiatives he was pursuing seemed quite random an unstructured. But he cared and wanted to actually do things well, even through he was also changed by the system’s pressure to create own projects that would push one’s career up.

But his voice has not been silenced. With Alastair Campbell, he has created the popular podcast The Rest is Politics. Yet, as this memoir shows, his straightforward honesty, accompanied by his ability to think outside the box in all four of the ministries in which he served, indicates his huge loss to Parliament. He was originally a youthful Labour supporter. Perhaps a Starmer government could provide the answer? Speaking on the anonymity of his colleagues though, Stewart’s approach to discretion can often be frustrating. As vindicating as it is to watch him expose the ineptitude of many current figures like Gove and Kwarteng, his attitude towards junior ministers is a lot more ambivalent. Supposedly out of charity he omits their identities, but for those he is praising (and assumes will be hindered by his co-sign) he provides little to no detail, and for those he criticises he essentially describes them in everything but name. While his intentions are admirable, it can’t be helped but to consider whether all this obfuscation is a waste of time when half the time the identities are given away through such idiosyncratic detail? (The wikipedia rabbit hole in my search history for ‘Labour MP Defence Select Committee affair with Russian spy’ can attest to this)

From the former Conservative Cabinet minister and co-presenter of 2022's breakout hit podcast The Rest is Politics , a searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament

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It was now with three defeats for her Brexit deal behind her, and a crumbling administration, that May promoted Stewart to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development. Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels very distant and theoretical. In Kabul, we delivered the first water supply, the first sanitation, the first electricity for people who had never had these things before. Every week, we seemed to be erecting a new building. It was fast. I was on the ground, shaping, managing. Not signing paper in an office. I was confident that I was changing lives.’

The book has several moments of self-contempt. At one point Stewart thought about killing himself. He brooded in the middle of the night and often experienced disgust. Politics, he came to think, was a “rebarbative profession”. “In London, I felt increasingly exhausted and ashamed,” he admits. He developed migraines and kept going by taking painkillers. Despite all this, his idealism and love of country – his stated reason for joining the Tories – never quite left him.

Rory Stewart was never going to be prime minister. He had far too many glaring flaws. For one, he’d held a variety of difficult jobs in the real world (soldier, diplomat, professor at Harvard), rather than becoming a Spad straight out of Oxford, like modern MPs are meant to. For another, his speeches made it sound as if he’d given actual thought to the subject at hand, rather than just reciting a list of crowd-pleasing soundbites scripted by a strategist. Most damaging of all, however, was the inescapable impression that he said things because he genuinely meant them, rather than because a pollster had told him they would be popular. As a result, he was entirely unsuited to modern politics, and his campaign to become PM in 2019 ended in swift and crushing failure. A searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament from Rory Stewart, former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of breakout hit podcast The Rest Is Politics On the plus side, the book is often entertaining. Stewart vividly records his encounters with the key figures of his time, and while it’s not necessarily breaking news that David Cameron is a glib hypocrite, Boris Johnson a charming liar and Liz Truss a gibbering nitwit, it’s enjoyable to read fresh evidence of it. Particularly amusing are Stewart’s memories of Steve Hilton, the shoeless svengali of Cameron’s No10. During one visit of Downing Street, the author finds Hilton on the floor gazing at a map, murmuring: “F— me, look how big Scotland is. This is just f—ing mad, man.” From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: