Political memoirs don’t always age well. Getting the juice on the big beasts of Westminster can be tantalising until a changing of the guard occurs and those big beasts disappear from public life. But Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge digs deeper than most. As well as a fascinating insider account of the Cameron-May-Johnson premierships, it is a scathing portrait of our flawed political system and a “rebarbative profession” that, despite Stewart’s appetite for public service, chewed him up and spat him out.
Luckily, he is nothing if not adaptable: born in Hong Kong, Stewart is a former soldier who worked for the diplomatic service in Indonesia, as an administrator in postwar Iraq, who taught human rights at Harvard and led a charitable foundation in Afghanistan. When he entered parliament in 2010, he made a maiden speech in which he unwisely compared himself to Scott of the Antarctic, after which he worked variously in environmental and rural affairs, international development and prisons. After a failed bid to become Conservative party leader, he finally stood down as an MP in 2019.
Listeners to Stewart’s chart-busting podcast The Rest Is Politics will be familiar with his amiably philosophical tone, which here comes with added spikes when describing his former colleagues: George Osborne is cynical and untrustworthy; Boris Johnson has a “staggering willingness to insist on the untrue”; Liz Truss is “startlingly rude”. But Stewart is always alert to his own flaws, never more so than during the Tory leadership campaign when, during a televised debate, he yanked his tie off in despair and felt “like a satellite falling out of orbit”.
• Available via Penguin Audio, 16hr 20min
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