Politics On the Edge
A Memoir from Within
Rory Stewart
Having read it
★★★★☆
A worryingly good book for telling the many backward and inadequate ways politics and its associations operate; its honesty about and toward offering a sensible and grounded lens through which to view the author’s own attitudes and work (as well as a few others) in the UK’s political systems and among its attitudes and approaches is a welcome reality check.
Rory makes a pretty good effort in his years as an MP and certainly seems to have done some good in his Penrith and The Borders constituency, as well as his ministerial attempts at shaking up where and when possible various departments, including international development and being Minister of State for Prisons.
As he infers through this memoir, despite the few good moments in politics and its machinations and day-to-day shenanigans, we don’t really seem to help ourselves in and around it all to really be able to make societal things better, certainly these days and importantly for the mid- to long-term.
It was also telling to read of managerial-style goings on within many a politically led setup that he had to deal with as it made clear that the game-playing, posturing and mostly saying the right thing at the right moment to probably then just deny or excuse it to someone else later, happens a lot. It is not always fair that that seems to play well for those confident and content with behaving like that, but it isn’t necessarily fair to those that can and would like to actually help – help, learn and develop effective and meaningful change – with what skills, talents and compassion they may have and that can help progress things meaningfully and constructively.
The political game-playing seems to feed and is fed by the media game-playing that seems to just grab attentions to self-justify and continue their money-making and the self-fulfilling prophecies that surround the Westminster bubble; it sells more effectively than useful insight, critique or even approval does.
We really only have ourselves to blame and those in politics and in power don’t (and seemingly won’t) buck the system that looks after them?
Given all that, one can understand why he walked away and freed himself from it, despite the skill and talent he brought to it and developed over his nine years as an MP: that Westminster political baggage was just not worth carrying any longer.
A good passage
Four years on the back benches had left me contemptuous of what I saw as the superficiality of the leadership. I had been appalled at the apparent pettiness, insecurity and envy of so many older MPs – the hearty obsequiousness to Cameron in the tea room. I had struggled to reconcile what I had witnessed with a Parliament whose reputation had been founded on Churchill’s irrepressible insistence on awkward truths, or Gladstone’s prophetic dignity. I felt that MPs – who had served the long apprenticeships of doorstep campaigns, who used Prime Minister’s Questions to land little stories in their local papers, and exploited their media appearances to repeat party slogans – too often treated friends with the same half-truths and evasive geniality with which they approached their electors. I felt the very skills which helped them get elected and promoted undermined their ability to think clearly about what the country needed. I hated how politicians used the pompous grandeur of the Palace of Westminster to pretend to a power they did not have, and to take credit for things they had not done. I felt all this was at the heart of our failure of responsibility in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the grotesque inadequacy of so many of our domestic policies.
But now I realised that I had become part of the same phenomenon. With the exception of Afghanistan, the House of Lords, and a nervous abstention on mountain rescue, I had always gone along with the whips. I had spent a decade, before entering politics, writing and speaking about how to intervene abroad, but I had not defended a principled position on Syria. I had ceased to study legislation in detail. I mocked the pallid inconsistencies of so much of our policy, and winced at the careless machismo of so many cuts to government spending – but I didn’t speak out publicly against those things. I didn’t argue with my right-wing local councillors, or even call out their racism.
[...a chapter later...]
I began to feel that the longer I stayed in politics, the stupider and the less honourable I was becoming: the less I was listening to other people. I reflected a great deal, far too much, about my House of Lords vote. I did not conclude that I could have done anything else, when George Osborne had tried to bribe and threaten me. Indeed, I was pretty sure that most of my colleagues would have done the same. But why, if I had done the right thing, did I feel anxious about it? Had I not quite understood what it would mean to spend five years in my late thirties and early forties trapped as a backbencher in the House of Commons, while my peers engaged with policy and made decisions in ministerial departments?
A second good passage
‘I don’t believe in rural affairs, Rory. I think there is no relevant difference between rural and urban populations?’
David Cameron, I was beginning to realise, had put in charge of environment, food and rural affairs a Secretary of State [Liz Truss] who openly rejected the idea of rural affairs and who had little interest in landscape, farmers or the environment. I was beginning to wonder whether he could have given her any role she was less suited to – apart perhaps from making her Foreign Secretary. Still, I could also sense why Cameron was mesmerised by her. Her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking; but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation. If Liz Truss worried about the consequences of any of this for the way that government would work, she didn’t reveal it.
A third good passage
Those months spent in ministry offices, on iron railings in narrow Victorian blocs, with victims of crime, probation officers, judges and prisoners, were both a shameful indictment of the squalid ineptitude of British government, and a revelation of extraordinary, sometimes almost beautiful qualities in prison officers and prisoners. It was the first role in government that I had really loved.