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New Statesman
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In conversation, and in his new memoir Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart makes the Commons sound worse than Iraq, where several attempts were made to kill him and his colleagues with mortars and rockets. He thinks it was “definitely” worse being an MP than being the deputy governor of an Iraqi province. But Stewart still doesn’t know who he is, writes Will Lloyd at the link in bio. He traces Stewart’s sense of self to his childhood, with the podcaster sharing that “as a young man he had ‘prepared himself to do something completely astonishing, something that people would talk about for hundreds of years afterwards’. Anything less than greatness seemed unthinkable”. But this dream has since been distorted, “in the end, Stewart was an MP for just short of a decade, and a cabinet minister for three months.” His disenchantment with Westminster becomes clear: “While Stewart still meets with prospective MPs, he describes being a politician as ‘brutal’ and ‘enervating’: ‘I became a worse person doing it.’ He seems to have experienced the past decade as one long insult.” “Stewart was only a ‘romantic’ in the sense that he had a dream that failed him. Would life ever be as good to him as it was on some sunny June evening walking along the Eton Road in his tails, when his possibilities were endless? His experiences in politics had scratched something out of him.” Read the interview in full via the link in bio. Photographed for the New Statesman by Robbie Lawrence #uk #ukpolitics #rorystewart #ConservativeParty