It was in 2002 that Theresa May, then a future Prime Minister, warned the Conservatives that some people were referring to them as “the nasty party”. Rory Stewart, a Tory MP between 2010 and 2019, does not use that description in his political memoirs* and clearly would never apply them to all politicians, some of whom are his friends and for some whom he has a high regard. But his book leaves little doubt that it is what he thinks of others.
Stewart’s memoir is as illuminating as well as well-written and entertaining as any one is likely to read emanating from the past 14 years of Tory rule of Britain. Though he was a cabinet member for only three months in 2019, a junior minister for a comparatively brief four years, and never held one of the great offices of state, he makes up for his lack of first-hand knowledge of the highest of high office by his sharp power of observation.
He deploys a shrewd ability to assess events and situations and recount them with a sometimes sardonic style which exposes the absurdity of political and official attitudes to even the most sombre occurrences without belittling their serious, sometimes tragic, consequences for those most affected, whether in war-torn countries in Asia, poverty-and Ebola-stricken regions of Africa or drug-and violence-ridden prisons in the UK.
He manages to catch the idiocies of political life without detracting from the deadly serious nature of the issues it often deals with. The tragi-comedy of Brexit and all the duplicities of the campaign to succeed Theresa May, from which Boris Johnson emerged victorious, were prime examples.
His book leads the reader from the whipped farcicality and powerlessness of backbench life at Westminster to the incompetence and frustrations of ministerial life in Whitehall and finally the lies and backstabbing of party colleagues competing for the top job at No. 10. Nine years in politics, he writes towards the end, had been a shocking education in lack of seriousness, The reader does not know whether to laugh at it all or weep.
Backbencher
Stewart experienced the sometimes risible nature of parliamentary procedures early on in his career when he was instructed by the Conservative whips to vote against a proposal – for no better reason than that it had come from Labour – which he regarded as in the best interests of the mountain rescue teams in his Penrith and the Border constituency. He avoided the vote by hiding in a Westminster toilet. No one seemed to notice and he got away with it.
Years later during Theresa May’s desperate attempts to get a Brexit deal through Parliament Stewart, one of her allies, was on the receiving end of a similar manoeuvre when a fellow MP who had promised him a vital vote failed to show up; he claimed to have fallen asleep in the library. Thus was the fate of the nation determined.
As a backbench MP Stewart had no influence on policy and had to pick up news of what the government was doing from the media like everyone else. Even as chair of a select committee on a subject on which he had years of first-hand experience (defence) he had almost no say.
Minister
When Minister for Africa Stewart learned of a coup over the radio and jumped into a taxi to the Foreign Office, only to find officials and the high commissioner, by video link, already well on the way to agreeing a response which he regarded as quite inadequate. No one had thought to inform him, the responsible minister.
As minister responsible for overseas aid he visited a UN project at a school in Zambia that had been allocated $40,000 for two latrines and five plastic buckets which had actually cost only around $1,000. Why hadn’t the teacher simply been given the $1,000 and told to buy the equipment? It might have been stolen, he was told. “I restrained myself from suggesting the UN had stolen the money instead.”
In Nigeria he found a clinic – a gift of the British people – with human excrement on the floor, an electric fan but no electricity within ten miles, no sheets on the beds, no medicines on the shelves and no patients mad enough to enter.
He was unable, however, to get any reform of overseas aid past his boss, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson. Johnson simply wanted undefined “wins”. He told his Africa Minister: “We should sort out Libya…Come on Rory, you can do it. Libya.”
So instead of sensible, modest, perhaps even viable on-the-ground reforms to the administration of aid, Stewart was given a hopeless post-imperial vanity project to “sort out”. Libya wasn’t even in his brief, which was restricted to sub-Saharan Africa, nor even a former British colony. None of it mattered.
There was at least something useful that Stewart’s experience as a politician taught him though. At the start of his career as the most junior of junior minsters at the Environment Department he had been unable to raise £150,000 for a government litter strategy. By the end of his time as Africa Minister he had developed the Whitehall know-how to write and get funding for a £4bn strategy for the continent to help justify Britain’s seat on the UN Security Council and, with the US, provide some balance to the growing Chinese dominance of African governments and resources.
Then he was moved by Theresa May from the great Victorian imperial Whitehall pile of the FO to Basil Spence’s brutalist multi-story brave new woke, management-speaking world of the Justice Department, where he chose to take on the portfolio of what a colleague half-jokingly called Minister for Prison Riots. He now found himself responsible in the midst of austerity for prisons that were old, overcrowded, understaffed, violent, filthy, drug-ridden and were turning minor criminals into major ones. It was here that he set about his most serious programme of sustained reforms, often against the opposition of prison management and officers and the right-wing media. No wonder his experience led him to write in a different context that “we had seemed too vindictive in our spending reductions”.
Constituency MP
His story ends with his vain attempt to win the succession to Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. He never stood a chance against Boris Johnson in his pomp but surprised his colleagues by outshining them in spite of their betrayals and mendacious briefings. No long afterwards he had the Conservative whip withdrawn over Brexit and subsequently resigned from the party.
Stewart feels now that his happiest and most productive time as an MP was spent in his constituency working with the villagers, small businesses and farming communities of the Lake District, far away from Parliament, which he says increasingly reminded him of a boarding school stripped by scarlet fever of most of the responsible adults and all the nicer and kinder pupils.
If the Conservatives can be this nasty to each other we should not be surprised at what they and their austerity have done to the rest of us over the past 14 years.
*Politics on the Edge. By Rory Stewart. Published by Vintage.
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