Rory Stewart: ‘I fought an existential fight against Boris Johnson, who is a terrible human being’

Rory Stewart has been an academic, diplomat, aid worker, author, broadcaster, soldier and politician. He was a Conservative MP for almost 10 years and served as a minister under British prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May. He had a ringside seat for the Conservatives’ convulsions over Brexit and stood unsuccessfully for the party leadership against Boris Johnson in 2019. Having left parliament, he now co-presents the UK’s most popular political podcast, The Rest Is Politics with Alastair Campbell. His new book, Politics on the Edge, explains how and why he became an MP and the experiences that followed.

You got the call from David Cameron, although I don’t think David Cameron thought he was calling you.

David Cameron said he wanted people who’d never been involved in politics before to become politicians. I was a professor in the States at that time, so I took him at his word. I came back to present myself and pretty quickly discovered that when he said he wanted new people to enter politics, he didn’t mean me. He meant Liz Truss, he meant Priti Patel.

What was he looking for if you didn’t fit the bill?

He was looking for much more diversity, and he saw me as a white, upper middle-class old Etonian.

There is an obvious criticism that yourself, Cameron and Boris Johnson all went to Eton. Rishi Sunak went to another public school, and that this is not a healthy way to run a country in the 21st century. And clearly it has not worked out very well over the last 10 years or so.

Boy, has it not. I’m not sure that it’s fundamentally about class, except insofar as British society is a lot about class. I think it’s to do with profound cynicism and lack of seriousness in our society.

I am that deeply suspect Irish creature, a mother of an only child. It was by choice

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I’m interested in what you mean by unseriousness. Is it something that’s particularly true of British politics?

I don’t know enough about Irish politics, but it’s profoundly true of British politics. And of American politics. It doesn’t matter what party you’re talking about, Fundamentally, all they really care about is getting elected and stuffing it to the opposition. That creates a mindset which is very simplifying, very tribal, all about offering easy solutions to complicated problems, all about being hyper-confident. They spend very little time worrying deeply about the problems of governing or policy.

Is that new, or has it always been thus? Because the parties have been around for a long time and the electoral system has been around more than 100 years now.

You’re right, there are bits of it that were always there, but one of the things that’s changed is the way the media and campaigning work. And actually the sense of honour amongst MPs themselves; there’s been a change in the moral character of members of parliament. If you watch Harold Wilson being interviewed in the early 1970s, it’s ... it’s a very serious, thoughtful thing. It’s the kind of conversation we’re having today. But nobody talks to politicians in the way that you’re talking to me today. There were many, many things that were wrong about the old system. Of course it was much more elitist. There were many more people who went to schools like mine. It was a much cosier old boys’ club. But they also had a very, very serious, dignified sense of their own profession.

When you were elected as an MP for Cumbria, you were required to languish on the backbenches for five years or so, although you had made no bones about the fact that you wanted to be a minister and to make a difference. But you did become close to your constituents.

I built a lot of friendships. Hopefully I helped a number of individuals. But I wasn’t able to get done the kinds of things that I’d been able to do in previous bits of my life. It wasn’t like running a charity in Afghanistan where, week by week, I can see buildings going up, we’re getting a school going, we’re getting a clinic going.

But you stuck with it and were re-elected in the 2015 general election which led inexorably to the Brexit referendum the following year. You are a Remainer, but you sensed the swell of pro-Brexit sentiment in your own constituency as the referendum approached.

I did. And it was difficult. My constituency voted Brexit. And as you say, I’m a Remainer. It was terrible for me because I felt that the impact on small sheep farms was going to be catastrophic. And yet many of those farmers were also voting for Brexit. So I felt, once the result came through, that my duty was to try to find the softest Brexit that we could. I pushed very hard for a customs union model, because I was worried about the Border in Ireland. So initially I got hard behind Theresa May’s deal. And finally I just came openly out and said what we need is a customs union and came very close to getting that through parliament. I was defeated by three votes in the end.

Rory Stewart on Keir Starmer, Liz Truss and the 'unseriousness' of UK politics

Listen | 46:09

In advance of the referendum, many of those calling for Britain to leave the European Union said there was no question of leaving the customs union or the single market. The way all that just turned on a dime still amazes me.

And of course it caught me unawares because I took literally what they’d said. I hadn’t realised they were just bulls**tting. In the end, the logic of their position was nationalistic. They wanted to make no compromises.

Do you think they thought about the Northern Ireland problem?

I think many English MPs thought about it very little. But the most mystifying thing for me was the DUP, because they were the swing vote on things like this customs union vote I was trying to bring through. It seemed to me self-evident that a customs union would be better for Northern Ireland and that leaving the customs union was going to cause huge problems. And the conversations I had with Ian Paisley Jr and other members of the DUP were completely bewildering. Because he’s not daft. He understood entirely the logic of what I and many others were saying, and yet they wouldn’t move. I don’t know what it was. I began to think they just didn’t like the language of compromise, that there was something cultural, which was just making them think the more I said can we find the middle ground here, the more suspicious they got. And they liked the style of Boris Johnson. The fact that he was lying to them was sort of evident to them. I remember saying to them, you cannot possibly believe this man when he says he’s not going to put a border in the Irish Sea. That’s the only solution he can produce. And they’d say to me, oh, yes, Rory, we know Boris from old. Don’t worry. But in the end, they sort of believed him.

I suppose the reality is the DUP had always been a highly Eurosceptic party, going back to the rhetoric of Ian Paisley in the 1970s. So, a little like the way you were talking earlier on about nationalism, the emotional core of the DUP was bringing it in that direction.

Exactly. And I think this is part of the problem of politics, which is that it’s all very well operating on a superficial level, thinking that you can fix everything just by making rational arguments. There is deep emotion, deep identity, deep communities, deep histories.

Your former Conservative colleague, Steve Baker, who was a Brexit ultra and is now a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office, said two things this week. One was that there should have been a supermajority requirement for the Brexit referendum, that it should only have passed with a 60 per cent Yes, which means Brexit wouldn’t have happened. And the other was that the same supermajority requirement should apply should there be a referendum on Irish unity, which of course is not what the Belfast Agreement allows for. What do you make of all that? He’s an interestingly volatile figure.

I think he’s fascinating. Obviously the first thing is to hold my head in my hands and go, oh my goodness, I can’t possibly believe this guy can be saying this, after he campaigned for Brexit and exploited a 52 per cent victory, to now say it should have been 60 per cent. But I also want to give him credit for thinking and being prepared to change his mind. He’s a smart enough guy to be aware that what he said can sound embarrassing and he’ll be mocked for it. And I think he’s probably right. My instinct is that you can’t change the whole direction of a country on a 52/48 vote. It’s too narrow. It’s too divisive. I would have felt that with Scotland, too. But he’s a very, very odd messenger for that, given his history.

The situation in Northern Ireland is somewhat different. It’s not just about a constitutional debate on the UK’s place within the European Union. And it has a very different valence from the debate in Scotland, obviously. The idea from the nationalist perspective, or a broader pro-unification perspective, should that emerge, that a minority would have a veto over constitutional change could cause all kinds of difficulties.

Oh, it’d be horrifying. Whatever the rights or wrongs of debates about supermajorities, you’ve got to take the history into account, and you can’t promise people that they can do it on a simple majority and then change the rules. So if you’re asking me whether it’s remotely acceptable for the junior Northern Island minister to suggest that they’re going to change the rules around what it takes, that seems to me to be incredibly politically provocative and dangerous.

[ Reviews of Politics on the Edge; The Abuse of Power; The Right to Rule: Tory shape-shifting and buck-passing  ]

[ Cult of the gifted amateur persists ]

A key moment in the book is when you stand for the Tory leadership in 2019, when the whole post-referendum crisis is at its height and Theresa May’s government is falling apart. You are disappointed not to win. But you are absolutely devastated to lose to Boris Johnson, who does not rank very high on your list of preferred politicians.

That’s absolutely right. I felt it was very important that we tried to fight for a vision of the Conservative party that I cared about. Then I found myself increasingly feeling I’m not really fighting just for the left of the Conservative party. I’m fighting an existential fight against Boris Johnson, who is a terrible human being, and is going to be a terrible prime minister. I could not believe that people voted for him. One of the things that kept me going through the campaign is the British people in the end are sensible people. They are never going to choose this clown. And of course they did.

Why was that?

Our world has changed. People don’t trust any of us any more. I think they wanted to throw him like a hand grenade against the system. There’s a lot of people out there who think that the way I talk is boring, elitist, too technocratic, pious, and they wanted a bit of fun. And anyway, they think we’re all a bunch of crooks.

Do you think Keir Starmer is inevitably the next prime minister?

I think so. There was a small window for Rishi Sunak to say, look, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were useless. I apologise profoundly for them. I’m kicking them and all their allies out and I’m charting a completely new government. And then, of course, he found himself in an environment of high interest rates, high inflation, creaking public services. I don’t know that I would have been able to do much better than he did. I might have tried to be a little bit more idealistic. I think it’s a mistake, when you’re in a losing position, to try to appeal to the far right of the Conservative Party and start watering down our climate commitments or making radical anti-immigration statements, But I think it was probably unwinnable for him anyway.

As somebody who has argued for a reinvention of political centrism, when you look at Starmer, is he the kind of centrist you’re talking about?

Yes, but I’m worried that for centrism to really recover it needs to be more than Keir Starmer. One thing he’s reasonably good at is bringing a sense of moral character back to politics. I like that, but I think the two things that he’s lacking are, first what Aristotle would have called pathos or emotion. He’s not a great communicator. He needs to appeal to people’s hearts as well as their heads. But the most serious thing that he’s lacking is what Aristotle would have called logos, the thinking rational part. He’s not laying out policies. There’s nobody listening who will have any idea what Keir Starmer’s economic policies are, although he’s almost certain to be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. He doesn’t really have anything to say about how he’s going to fund public services, how he’s going to get economic growth off the ground, what he’s going to do about the crisis in our criminal justice system, about international policy. The centre is only going to be able to take off if it can combine moral edge, an ability to communicate, and a clear, logical vision of what policy should be to make the world a better place.

Is there any possibility that’s just tactical, that he doesn’t want to give hostages to fortune?

It’s possible, but my fear is that how people campaign is how they govern. It’s quite rare to see somebody campaign in a vacuous fashion, and then come in and do an incredibly rigorous, clearly detailed, bold bit of governing. And I’m a bit doubtful whether Keir Starmer will pull it off.

This is an edited transcript. To hear the full conversation, go to the Irish Times Inside Politics Podcast. Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within is published by Jonathan Cape