Politics On the Edge: The instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller from the host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics

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Your crude and uncouth reviewer longed for him to tell the game-playing whips to eff off when they insisted he stay in parliament and miss his train to Penrith; to face down the senior civil servant who accused him loudly and mutinously of using International Development as an ego trip. But the man from Cumbria wandered lonely as a cloud through all the turbulence, keeping his temper, doing his job. How do you feel, about the other parts of the job,’ John persisted, ‘now that you have real power? It’s a drug, isn’t it, power? I bet you’re glad now you didn’t give up on being an MP.’

Politics on the Edge: A Memoir From Within, by Book review: Politics on the Edge: A Memoir From Within, by

From the former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of breakout hit podcastThe Rest of Politics,a searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament When serving as a minister under Truss he recalls her requesting him to slash the budget of his department by 20 per cent. Stewart expressed natural consternation at such an ask, but Truss reassured him: “I have a mentor who is a very successful businessman who says all businesses can always be cut by 20 per cent.” So, when Stewart rattles off the innumerable social, moral and political failings of some colleagues he – more often than not – seems to have a perfectly legitimate case. Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian FaberStewart’s account of his own crusade against a no-deal Brexit – leading him to eventually be ejected from the Conservatives – comes bearing a similar instinct to wallow in one’s doomed righteousness. Stewart now hosts the wildly popular podcast The Rest is Politics with former Labour spindoctor Alastair Campbell. He inspires fervent devotion from a particular brand of moderate – attracted to his eloquence and sanity. It is perhaps the most popular the man has ever been. From the former Conservative Cabinet minister and co-presenter of 2022’s breakout hit podcast The Rest is Politics, a searing insider’s account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament Stewart presents himself as a bulwark against these trends; he focuses - perhaps to the detriment of his career in professional politics - on detail, understanding and compromise, while his contemporaries focus on sound bites, meaningless slogans and career enhancing immoral manoeuvres.

Politics On the Edge - Penguin Books UK Politics On the Edge - Penguin Books UK

That does not mean he is always an excellent administrator or that I would believe he was a great minister - a lot of the initiatives he was pursuing seemed quite random an unstructured. But he cared and wanted to actually do things well, even through he was also changed by the system’s pressure to create own projects that would push one’s career up. Disillusionment was swift. MPs were uninterested in policy, he discovered. Instead they were obsessed with scandal. He found “impotence, suspicion, envy, resentment, claustrophobia and Schadenfreude”. Cameron made speeches about diversity. But he filled his private office with white-shirted old Etonians, drawn “from an unimaginably narrow social group”. In one vote Stewart rebelled over an amendment on mountain rescue by hiding in the loo. No one noticed. Rory Stewart was never going to be prime minister. He had far too many glaring flaws. For one, he’d held a variety of difficult jobs in the real world (soldier, diplomat, professor at Harvard), rather than becoming a Spad straight out of Oxford, like modern MPs are meant to. For another, his speeches made it sound as if he’d given actual thought to the subject at hand, rather than just reciting a list of crowd-pleasing soundbites scripted by a strategist. Most damaging of all, however, was the inescapable impression that he said things because he genuinely meant them, rather than because a pollster had told him they would be popular. As a result, he was entirely unsuited to modern politics, and his campaign to become PM in 2019 ended in swift and crushing failure.These days Stewart leads a non-profit organisation that gives cash handouts to the poor of East Africa, and, with Alastair Campbell, co-hosts every centrist dad’s favourite podcast, The Rest is Politics. He has also, however, found time to write this memoir, Politics on the Edge: the story of his 10 years as a Tory MP. It’s very good. Even so, I’m not sure I should recommend it. This is because it casts such a depressing light on Westminster that it may put the reader off voting ever again. He is kinder about Theresa May. After the Brexit vote and Cameron’s resignation, May made Stewart development minister, followed by prisons, and then promoted him to cabinet as secretary of state for international development. Unusually for a front-rank politician, she had a “private personality”. Stewart supported her EU withdrawal agreement, as hardline Brexiters plotted her overthrow, and the party lurched into magical thinking. Politics, he came to think, was a “rebarbative profession”... He developed migraines and kept going by taking painkillers He did it best as prisons minister, inheriting a situation where 85,000 convicts were being jammed into 65,000 prison places and where, perversely, a third of prison officers had been sacrificed to austerity. Violence was rife, fuelled by drugs. He knew that access to them was 30 times higher in jails here than in Sweden. With support from his boss, David Gauke, he drew up a programme to fix the broken windows through which drone-delivered drugs arrived regularly, installing scanners, improving search procedures and setting clearer standards.

Politics On The Edge | Books Cumbria Politics On The Edge | Books Cumbria

Prison violence was on the way down when Stewart was asked to see the prime minister. With “some of the monarch’s stiff authority” Theresa May promoted him to a cabinet role split between the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where an unhappy Boris Johnson held the position of foreign secretary. As Stewart tells us: “A man who enjoyed the improbable, the incongruous and the comically over-stated had been trapped in a department whose religion was tact and caution.” But that was tiny, Rory. You were only working with a few hundred people. Now you can change the lives of millions.’ Over the past 13 years of Tory rule, the party has chaotically and destructively managed Britain’s exit from the European Union; sifted through five prime ministers; endured the paroxysm of madness under Liz Truss; been gripped by internecine warfare in the House of Commons; and shaken up its political identity countless times.

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From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us The first is the narrative about the British political system. It is genuinely enlightening to be introduced to the various byzantine structures that a politician must navigate through the raw eyes of a naive first-timer: the party machine (whips, wannabe grandees & the PM inclusive), the British press, and the Civil Service. The first impressions are laughable and absurd. After twenty chapters, it becomes hard to laugh. But the overall narrative seems to be that no one is really in charge, and no one is interested in taking charge. No one is concerned about the details, except for all the people too concerned with the details. Yes, Minister prefigured this by forty years, but it is harder to swallow when you realise that it really, really is true. The most comically dark passage is Stewart's determination to cease funding to north-west Syria, for fear that the UK government is inadvertently cashing up members of al-Qaeda. Months of flying Bond-like around the world to find out who truly possesses the authority to cut the program leaves him with no answers. He had been told that the decision had to come, variously, from him, from the secretary of state, from the prime minister, from MI5 or MI6, from the NSC, from Cabinet, from the senior civil servants within his department, from the embassy on the ground, from the foreign secretary, even from the American president. Despite all this, the funding never stops. That is, until months later when Stewart was proved entirely correct: Britain had been sending money that ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda. As soon as bad press was on the horizon, the funding stopped... When Stewart talks of political communication rather than decision making, someone like Baudrillard would find himself surprised precisely never. Discussions about policy have been hollowed out by a party machine obsessed with shaping the narrative, a fourth estate obsessed with misrepresenting it, and a constituency of voters obsessed with ignoring it. If it was the kind of open primary that saw Stewart adopted as a parliamentary candidate, he’d have walked it. But it wasn’t, and even if he’d made it through to the final two, the withered husk of the Tory membership was always going to vote for Johnson. In the end Stewart was expelled from the party, along with Churchill’s grandson, two ex-chancellors and six other former cabinet ministers. It’s hard to talk about a book like this without talking too tiresomely about your own politics (which must inevitably come under scrutiny if you’re to write a full review), so I’ll instead simply say that I think Rory has given us a very good book: Politics on the Edge is sharply and poetically written. In fact, it is sometimes a smidge overwritten. But, despite this quibble, I nonetheless found myself drawing a stylistic comparison between Rory and George Orwell. Orwell was also an Old-Etonian-Old-Oxonian child of colonialism who went on to have a colourful self-examined life preoccupied with thoughts weighed down in the mires of worldly geopolitical philosophies. This (admittedly grandiloquent) comparison probably only occurred to me because I’ve lately been on something of an Orwell binge and, yes, linking Rory to one of the 20th-century’s Great Writers is undoubtedly an overreach; regardless, I found Politics on the Edge achieves some of the same suspenseful intensity of Homage to Catalonia as well as the searing anti-establishmentarian ire of The Road to Wigan Pier — odd, given that it was written by a centre-right conservative rather than Orwell’s democratic socialist hand.

Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart review – a ringside seat

Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels very distant and theoretical. In Kabul, we delivered the first water supply, the first sanitation, the first electricity for people who had never had these things before. Every week, we seemed to be erecting a new building. It was fast. I was on the ground, shaping, managing. Not signing paper in an office. I was confident that I was changing lives.’

Yet Stewart emerges from the carnage a stronger character. He realises that up against the aggressive exaggeration of the European Research Group, his allies on the Tory benches are “like a book club going to a Millwall game”. It doesn’t make him any less intense and he still takes himself far too seriously, but the prisons job and defending what he (and I) saw as a reasonable solution to a 52-48 referendum result ends his “queasiness about confrontational politics”. May goes. Stewart’s wife thinks he should stand for leader. This political memoir is sui generis. Even the title betrays the contradictions of the work: Stewart is at once "on the edge" and "within". Rory Stewart has always made a virtue of his vulnerable transparency. He once asked a Financial Times profiler "do you think I should be prime minister?", and, while he is often consciously self-mythologising, he never recites false myth. Where, for example, Boris Johnson slaves to belie his true self, Rory Stewart slaves to announce his (or at least, his own conception of it). This makes the book utterly revealing and at times unsettling, and there are two narratives which both reveal and unsettle within. Loved the parts when Rory realises the reality of power in modern state and politics and an absolute highlight is this part when he is the most junior minister at the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) : I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t feel like what I mean by power. I felt far more powerful running a small NGO in Kabul.’