"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.

"A Conspiracy of Silence"

 Apologies for two of these essays in three days. This one, however, had been started before the extraordinary events of the past ten days – the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump and the decision by Mr. Biden to not seek a second term. With these developments, the future always unclear has become further obscured.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtottd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“A Conspiracy of Silence”

July 24, 2024

 

“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought

never to be the system of a regular government.”

                                                                                                                    Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

                                                                                                                    British Philosopher and Social Reformer

                                                                                                                    The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 1839

 

In many social settings, silence is the better alternative. As my mother would say: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Or my father: “Better to remain silent and have people think you a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” And my mother-in-law would quote the ancient proverb: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” 

 

Yet silence does not always contain the remedies its fans claim. In The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously, Martin Luther King wrote: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1986, Elie Wiesel spoke: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever humans endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

 

The silence of which I write does not bear the evil of which King and Wiesel wrote and spoke, nor is it the silence of my late in-laws and parents that leads to worried looks and shaking heads in social gatherings. My concern is the Omeretà, the code of silence of politicians and their accommodating friends in the media – it is the silence that deprives people of the facts necessary to make informed decisions. As the British Parliamentarian Rory Stewart wrote in the prologue of his recent book How Not to be a Politician, “The public see the appearance that someone else chooses to share.” 

 

A conspiracy of silence was responsible for a refusal to publicly debate the origin of COVID-19. It could be seen over the past three and a half years in the refusal of the media to expose the horrific effects of an open southern border; in the dire ramifications of federal debt that exceeds one hundred percent of GDP; and in the potentially disastrous repercussions of allowing Iran to build an Atomic bomb.

 

Silence has kept people ignorant of the consequences of a partisan federal bureaucracy that employs 2.7 million people in two thousand agencies – 95% of whom give money to the Democratic Party. The growth of the administrative state is usually ignored by mainstream media, as it serves their progressive goals. Considered by some the “fourth branch” of government – and unlike the other three branches, which have swung between Republican and Democratic control – it has remained reliably Democratic. 

 

This Omeretà between the media and their favored politicians is not new. The American people were kept in the dark when President Woodrow Wilson, in October 1919, suffered a severe stroke that left him incapacitated. On March 28 1944, shortly after returning from the Tehran Conference, Franklin Roosevelt, at the urging of his daughter Anna, visited his doctor, cardiologist Dr. Harold G. Bruenn at Bethesda Medical Naval Hospital. He was diagnosed with reduced lung capacity, hypertension, acute bronchitis and acute congestive heart failure. Again, his condition was kept secret from the American public.

 

Recently, a conspiracy of silence surrounded the cognitive decline of President Biden, before it was witnessed by 50 million people in his debate with Donald Trump.  Mr. Biden’s behavior exposed what most people already knew, or suspected, or at least those whose reading is not limited to The New York Times and the Washington Post and whose viewing is not bounded by MSNBC and CNN. Barton Swaim wrote in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “Elected Democrats, with the eager compliance of their allies in the media, dismissed any expression of concern about the president’s acuity.”  As for the debate, it was telling to read and listen to mainstream media’s analysis of what a cold or sleep-deprivation could do to an individual, otherwise in command of his faculties. Most of us who had watched with alarm Mr. Biden’s decline over the past three-and-a-half years felt like Chico Marx in the 1933 film Duck Soup: “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?” In The Spectator on July 22, Freddy Gray wrote that Biden’s health cover-up “may well go down as one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics.”

 

Silence, when it suppresses knowledge, is a dangerous stratagem, especially in a democracy where an informed electorate is critical; for voters hold power. Politicians of all stripes play loose with the truth. It is in their DNA, so it is left for the media to uncover the truth, without bias or prejudice. Their responsibility should always be to the public, to keep people informed. Candor on the part of politicians and accurate reporting by the media might have kept at bay the hatred and distrust that infests today’s politics.