The Guardian: How Rory Stewart went from 'Florence of Belgravia' to PM hopeful

 The Guardian


Rory Stewart
How Rory Stewart went from 'Florence of Belgravia' to PM hopeful

The MP has taken a roundabout route to power – and drawn admiration and derision along the way

Esther Addley

Sat 1 Jun 2019 06.00 BST
Last modified on Sat 1 Jun 2019 09.19 BST

Shares
55
Comments
29
Rory Stewart, the international development secretary.

Not long after Rory Stewart MP was appointed by David Cameron as a junior minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, he was asked a question in the Commons about the decline of the hedgehog in rural areas.

“Multa novit vulpes,” he began, “verum echinus unum magnum …” He referenced ancient Sumerian wax seals, the prows of Egyptian ships and Romany cures for baldness. He quoted Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Beatrix Potter. “I want to be serious for a moment,” he said, before making a gag about “prickly subjects”. It was, beamed the deputy speaker, “one of the best speeches I have ever heard in this house”.
Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you
Read more

Stewart, who is 46, now wants to be prime minister, along with at least 11 (it could easily be more by the time you read this) other Conservative colleagues. But do the Tories really think the best person to lead Britain through the Brexit crisis is (another) Old Etonian, who throws around Latin epigraphs and is considered, by the admittedly monochrome standards of Westminster, to be dashingly unconventional?

Well, of course they do – it’s just that they want the other one. Boris Johnson, still regarded as the clear frontrunner, has the declared support of almost 30 fellow Tory MPs, who will ultimately decide the two names that are placed before the party membership. Stewart has two.

It would take a bold speculator to back Stewart for anything other than crushing defeat. And yet in the past week the MP has been capturing attention and praise with a campaign that is as idiosyncratic as he is. Stewart, now international development secretary, has embarked on a whistlestop tour of the country, chatting to shopkeepers in Warrington and students in Edinburgh, visiting a mosque in Woking and exchanging “rusty” Dari with Afghans in Barking.

His many media interviews, meanwhile, in which he has surgically outlined why he would rule out a no-deal Brexit (he is the only candidate to do so), have won broad and sometimes surprising support from left and right. Columnists in the Spectator have praised his “refreshing ridiculousness” and argued he can “save the Tories”. Writers in the Guardian have praised him for putting “principle before power” and suggested he could come through the centre ground as a surprising winner. The scientist Brian Cox and Gary Lineker are admirers.

Why? “He is the very opposite of a career politician who has spent his life in the Westminster bubble,” says Stewart’s friend the documentary producer Jemima Khan, “and he is not afraid to get out and speak to people and to listen.

“The skills that a leader most needs right now … are common sense, logic, diplomacy and pragmatism – not hyperbole, jingoism and wishful thinking.”

“It’s clear that he is talking to people – young people, people who are disaffected with politics or who haven’t voted Conservative recently – in a way that other people aren’t,” argues Victoria Prentis, one of the MPs backing him.

Stewart’s talent, she says, is that he “reaches the parts other Tories can’t”; it is a phrase, word for word, that one used to hear about Johnson.

If the two men certainly have plenty in common – prep school, Eton, Oxford (where Stewart, like Cameron, did PPE) – Stewart has a much more eccentric biography than the man he describes, damningly, as “a very talented journalist”. The son of a senior MI6 officer who would wake the young Roderick at 6am to practice fencing in Hyde Park, he grew up in Hong Kong and Malaysia and “a classic small country mansion” in the Scottish Borders.

He was a summer tutor to princes William and Harry, served briefly in the British army, and worked for the Foreign Office in Indonesia and Montenegro (about which he offers baroque denials that he was a spy). He walked for two years across Asia, part of which took in a traverse of part of Afghanistan in 2002, which led to a bestselling book, The Places In Between.
Rory Stewart walking in Afghanistan aged 29, an experience he described in the book The Places In Between.
Rory Stewart walking in Afghanistan aged 29, an experience he described in the book The Places In Between. Photograph: Rick Loomis/LA Times via Getty Images

He has worked as the deputy to a US “governate coordinator” of an Iraqi region, been a lecturer at Harvard, and run a small NGO in Kabul. He has been the subject of a well-received play in London, been profiled by Time Magazine and (unmissably) the New Yorker, and has sold the film rights of his Afghanistan book to Brad Pitt’s production company. In 2008 Esquire declared him one of the 75 most important people of the 21st century.

Much of which, to some observers, is hyperbolic at best. Though few would speak on the record, there is a broad critique of Stewart that his biography is a little overegged and certainly self-regarding – leading to a nickname, a member of his wider social circle confides, of “Florence of Belgravia”.
Henry Lloyd-Hughes plays Stewart in Occupational Hazards at the Hampstead theatre in 2017.
Henry Lloyd-Hughes plays Stewart in Occupational Hazards at the Hampstead theatre in 2017. Photograph: Marc Brenner

Though Stewart has claimed to know “what it feels like to be in the army”, for instance, he spent only a gap year stint in the Black Watch and did not see active service. He can often give the impression his role in Iraq was rather more important than the reality, according to someone who witnessed his work there (“He was regarded as a pretty competent mid-ranking Foreign Office official … He wasn’t a nonentity and I think the view in Iraq was that he was conscientious, but he wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia.”)

Several well-placed observers of Stewart’s time in Afghanistan point out that his much-discussed Afghan walk, the origin of his reputation as an expert on the region, was a month spent crossing a comparatively safe part of the country (“Other people would call it a walking holiday,” notes one). Others accuse him of a somewhat colonialist mindset, abroad and at home; a friend who has known Stewart for many years recalled him discussing a plan to live in a council estate for a year to see how others live.

“In general, he has done a lot and it’s all very impressive,” says someone who observed Stewart at close quarters in Kabul. “But it’s not quite as impressive and remarkable as he allows people to think. This is not necessarily all his doing, but the willingness of others to project things on to him … All sorts of journalists wrote up the Turquoise Mountain Foundation [Stewart’s Afghan NGO, which aimed to preserve local crafts] as the most amazing project in Afghanistan, when it was actually a rather low impact thing that affected the lives of a small number of people.”

Claims this week to have “negotiated in Iraq, negotiated in Afghanistan” provoked “snorts of derision”, the former Afghanistan correspondent Jon Boone tweeted. “Who with, the Kabul guild of potters and calligraphers?”
Stewart in Maysan province, Iraq, in 2004.
Stewart in Maysan province, Iraq, in 2004. Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian

Some of this may be Etonian self-confidence, some an understandable tendency to self-promotion during a leadership campaign. He would not be the first politician to be accused of vanity, and to his credit he does not dissemble when asked directly about his experience (“It was unbelievably brief,” he told the New Yorker of his time in the Black Watch.)

And in a time of political crisis, Stewart’s supporters would argue, one’s background is surely less important than one’s competence and intentions. Prentis, a former government lawyer who has particular expertise in the justice system, says Stewart impressed her during his brief stint as prisons minister with his diligence and attention to detail.

“There is no rubbish with Rory, ever. He will always ask and seek and check, but you do feel that there is an honesty and an integrity there which isn’t usual in political discussion.”

Why, if that is the case, aren’t more Tories openly supporting him? “I suppose there are safer options,” she says. “But I’m not sure that this is the minute for safety.”
Topics

    Rory Stewart

    Conservative leadership
    Conservatives
    profiles

    Share on LinkedIn
    Share on Pinterest
    Share on WhatsApp
    Share on Messenger

comments (29)
Signed in as peakofithomspon
Your comments are currently being pre-moderated (why?)
Enter comment
1 2 3

    coloradosprings
    44s ago
    0 1

    He seems like a nice and reasonable guy who’s refreshingly different from the copy-and-paste born-again Brexiteer B list candidates in this contest.

    The selection process seems to be designed to return the least nice and reasonable candidate so he has no chance whatsoever of course.
    Reply Share
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Report
    LightlyFoxed
    49s ago
    0 1

    Why, if that is the case, aren’t more Tories openly supporting him? “I suppose there are safer options,” she says. “But I’m not sure that this is the minute for safety.”

    What safer options, exactly? If this isn't the minute for safety, when is? Considering the remaining Tory gaggle of morbid narcissists and incredible incompetents queuing to lead the party and make Britain a servile satellite of the United States, perhaps Steward is the safe option.
    Reply Share
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Report

Most popular

    UK
    UK politics
    Education
    Media
    Society
    Law
    Scotland
    Wales
    Northern Ireland

    Contact us
    Complaints & corrections
    SecureDrop
    Work for us
    Privacy policy
    Cookie policy
    Terms & conditions
    Help

    All topics
    All writers
    Digital newspaper archive
    Facebook
    Twitter

    Advertise with us
    Search UK jobs
    Dating
    Discount Codes

Support The Guardian
Available for everyone, funded by readers
Contribute
Subscribe
Back to top
© 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.




Sent from Samsung tablet.