Does Rory Stewart know how to fix politics?

A decade or so ago, Brad Pitt was interested in making a film about Rory Stewart. Stewart had run an Iraqi province. He had walked across Afghanistan. Then he was elected a Tory MP, and Pitt lost interest.

In hindsight, the Hollywood star was “absolutely right,” says Stewart. An election would have been “a catastrophic end to a movie”. Politics diminished the sometime Harvard professor who used to compare himself (half-jokingly) to Alexander the Great: “it makes you very needy and insecure.” He started feeling “like in that movie where the actor is put back in primary school”.

“I naively thought that it was a bit like a normal job . . . I hadn’t really taken on board the fundamental truth, which is: modern British politics is almost exclusively about being incredibly loyal to the leader, until the moment when the MP stabs the leader in the back.”

He excelled at neither loyalty nor disloyalty. Although he eventually rose to cabinet minister under Theresa May, he achieved much less than he hoped. After refusing to go along with Boris Johnson’s threat of a no-deal Brexit, he was kicked out of the Conservative party. His ten years in British politics were probably the most miserable of his life. “I had one job — to stop [Johnson] becoming prime minister — and I failed.” His final sense, he writes in his new memoir Politics on the Edge, is “one of shame”.

A less self-flagellating individual would see things differently. Stewart is hardly responsible for 20 years of policy debacles, from the Iraq war onwards. He was anti-Brexit, quick to call for Covid lockdowns, prescient that the US’s troop surge in Afghanistan would ultimately swing towards a hurried retreat. He emerged as a voice of principled, anti-populist conservatism. Opposing Johnson made him, if not a hero, then at least an anti-anti-hero.

Stewart has convalesced from Westminster: first teaching at Yale, then living in Jordan, from where his wife ran the craftsmanship charity that Stewart and the then Prince Charles once set up. Now he is back in London, rested and restless.

“I’m now almost ready to imagine coming back into politics if I was to run as a mayor or something. I was with [West Midlands mayor] Andy Street and [Greater Manchester] Andy Burnham yesterday, and I’m very jealous. Andy Burnham’s analysis of parliament is almost identical to mine. He’s just like, ‘what a terrible place, I was becoming the most awful human being and now in Manchester I can be myself and do stuff.’”

Stewart may be Westminster’s most eloquent critic. But he insists he doesn’t value his eloquence as others do. So the question is: does he have ways to fix things? 

Stewart’s eccentrities are unavoidable. When I ask my first question, he starts answering fluently — with his eyes shut. I crane to see if he is just squinting in the sunlight. No, his eyes are definitely shut. And they remain shut for two full minutes.

His description of Westminster is, however, clear-sighted. He recounts the absurdity of MPs having no clue what they’re voting on. He was blocked for promotion for years because he defied George Osborne by opposing an elected House of Lords (on the understandable grounds that it would create gridlock with the Commons).

When he became an environment minister, his boss Liz Truss gave him just three days to produce a plan for national parks, so she had something to brief to the media. Later, as minister for Africa, Stewart tried to condemn irregularities in Kenya’s elections — only to find the foreign secretary Boris Johnson publicly congratulating the winner. “Cripes . . . I am so sorry,” Johnson told him, “[The Kenyan foreign minister] caught me on my mobile”.

I thought that what needed to happen was that I needed to arrive, knock heads together, sort stuff out myself

As minister for international development and then for prisons, Stewart found aid money being wasted and broken windows allowing drugs to be brought in by drone. Officials shrugged off his doubts. Ministers move around so often that it’s “not very surprising” that civil servants refuse to obey them: Stewart served in four departments between 2015 and 2019. He is scathing about the pretence of seriousness. “You couldn’t — wouldn’t — run a fish and chip shop the way we run government.”

Even in areas such as prisons where he managed changes, he has regrets. “I’m beginning to realise that I was wrong. I thought that what needed to happen was that I needed to arrive, knock heads together, sort stuff out myself. And it doesn’t work in the end because a single individual based in London is never going to have the knowledge, capacity to do that properly. What you have to do is build systems, structures.”

Instead of more experts, he thinks it would be better simply to give cash to poor people. (He is now president of a charity, GiveDirectly, that does this). Cumbria might benefit from a £7mn rural development scheme “dreamt up by consultants”, but giving £10,000 to 700 local businesses would give “much better results”.

Stewart, often derided as a romantic, argues politics should look more to operational issues. “If we focused more on the practical details, I think we’d find we agree much more.” In the US, “the pro-life and pro-choice people hate each other, but often agree on how many days is suitable to do an abortion.”

Introducing citizens’ assemblies — where a randomly selected group of citizens hears expert evidence then deliberates — would build consensus. If there had been one on Brexit, “you would have ended up with a customs union”. On London’s ultra-low emissions zone, a citizens’ assembly would have ensured proper compensation for poor car owners. Politicians can’t force climate sacrifice on the public, but assemblies would allow people to embrace it voluntarily.

Stewart wants other changes. Ministers should serve at least two years, save in exceptional circumstances. They should undergo “a three-week training course” and provide a “proper structured handover” to successors. Around half the cabinet should be recruited from outside the Commons, “because the gene pool of MPs is extremely limited”.

The Commons should shrink from 650 MPs “to about 100”, focused like the US Senate on national and international issues. How would constituents lobby their representatives, as Cumbrian villagers lobbied him for better internet? “They shouldn’t be lobbying an MP. They should be lobbying a very powerful local mayor. The MP thing encourages the centralisation of power.”

Above all, Stewart wants to reform the electoral system, so that, like New Zealand’s, it has some proportional representation. “We need fresh, new parties coming in.

“The culture of [the current] parties has gone mad: the way the whips work, the way central offices think, is so bad. The best hope is to break it up. They are cartels, these parties.”

Stewart has frequently been compared to the adventurer Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence died in a motorbike accident aged 46. Stewart was expelled from the Tory party at the same age.

Now 50, he has the chance for another act. He co-hosts the hit podcast The Rest is Politics, with former Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell. Some episodes get 1mn downloads. But he admits it risks becoming an anti-Johnson echo chamber.

Stewart is still a Burkean conservative: “respect for tradition, love of country, prudence at home, restraint abroad.” He seems to have no way back in the Tory party that rejects his scepticism of Brexit. Does he feel the populist fever has passed? “No, it’s very much there. I think we’ll find, when Rishi Sunak loses the next election, Suella Braverman becomes the next leader of the Conservative party. And I also think Starmer is holding a lid on things that will erupt in the Labour party.”

We can’t afford to do what Keir Starmer often does, which is to do an ABBA Live replay of Tony Blair

To reinvigorate the centre, “we can’t afford to do what Keir Starmer often does, which is to do an ABBA Live replay of Tony Blair. The reason the populists got going was there was a lot wrong with the centrism of the 1990s and 2000s.”

The Iraq and Afghan wars revealed the limits of that “technocratic confidence”; New Labour’s financial formulas concentrated investment in the south-east, neglecting rural areas. Starmer should be “less micromanaging” — “he’s running the whole Labour party through about three people” — and start “producing some ideas. I don’t know anybody who can describe his economic policy.”

Stewart wants government to pump money into devolved administrations. It should commit to net debt falling as a share of GDP every year, helped by a wealth tax “on your house, after you die”.

He has taken from his failed 2019 Tory leadership bid that he wasn’t optimistic or funny enough. “But I still think I would have struggled to beat Boris Johnson, because there is so much desire to get someone like that and throw him like a hand grenade at the system.”

One serving minister asks whether Stewart really wants to be a better hand grenade — another old Etonian blowing up the system. A cautionary tale is Emmanuel Macron, who smashed France’s traditional parties but ended up strengthening populism.

Stewart’s frustration with Westminster is heightened because, unlike nearly all other MPs, he knows how big the world is. “Spending a lot of time in the States and with American politicians [before 2010] was part of the problem . . . Their civil service is much more open to outside ideas.”

Stewart is unusually self-critical, because he holds himself to the highest standards. And because he has invested so much energy in self-reflection, he is sensitive to what he sees as inaccurate criticism.

You cannot avoid the impression of a brilliant individualist, struggling to play a team sport. He is surely right that British politics has reached a crisis that demands more than just new leaders. Yet at least some of his indignations about the system might dissipate, if only he could find a way to be in charge of it.