"How Not to be a Politician," Rory Stewart - A Review

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

How Not to be a Politician, Rory Stewart

August 17, 2024

 

“If forced to spell out a political philosophy, I would have said that I

believed in limited government and individual rights; prudence at home

and strength abroad; respect for tradition, and love of my country.”

                                                                                                Rory Stewart (1973-)

                                                                                                How Not to be a Politician, 2023

 

Idealism gripped the traditionalist Rory Stewart when he left his post as the Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center of Human Rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government to campaign for a seat in Parliament. An intelligent, ethical man of boundless energy, he was elected in spring 2010 for the constituency of Penrith, on the border of Scotland. At the same time David Cameron was elected Prime Minister to lead a coalition government, ending thirteen years of Labour government and beginning fourteen years of Conservative government.

 

Prior to his Harvard assignment, the Hong Kong-born and Oxford-educated Stewart had served as a British diplomat in Indonesia and Montenegro; he undertook a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal; and he founded the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul. As well, Mr. Stewart had written two best-selling books.

 

While he enjoyed time spent with his rural constituents, his story chronicles his gradual disillusionment with his party as it drifted apart from Thatcherism, and his disgust for the cronyism of politics in general: “We should not regard debates as opportunities for open discussion; we might be called legislators, but we were not intended to overly scrutinize legislation; we might become members of independent committees, but we were expected to be loyal to the party; and votes would rarely entail a free exercise of judgement.” Nine years later, in 2019, he attended a dinner in London. He, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, and his nemesis Boris Johnson were running for Prime Minister. Someone asked him why he thought he was a Tory. He explained: “I said I believed in love of country, respect for tradition, prudence at home, restraint abroad.” “The table,” he wrote, “laughed.” He lost. Johnson won. Three years later, with Liz Truss as Prime Minister, Stewart ruminated: “Government might be about critical thinking, but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not.”

 

One might ask why he had decided to pursue a career in politics. The first decade of the 21^stCentury was a turning point in geopolitics. The glow from the West’s victory over Communism had begun to fade. As Stewart writes: “…2005…was the year in which the number of democracies ceased to increase, and in which the civil war in Iraq exposed the full catastrophe of the Iraq intervention. It was the last year in which the British economy was larger than the Chinese. Facebook had just been founded and Twitter was about to be launched.” The rise of China, the ubiquity of social media, and the credit crisis of 2008 “created,” he writes, “the space for an entirely different politics: the age of populism…” In 2009, the idealistic Rory Stewart felt he might be able to blunt that change. He found he could not.

 

While he writes of British politics, his disenchantment with all politics is pertinent, especially to the United States where unity has disappeared and political discontent has set in, as extremism created politics of populism on the right and statism on the left. The book’s strength is that it illustrates challenges we face; its weakness is that it does not provide a solution. Nevertheless, it deserves your attention.