Moving on to the Department of International Development, Stewart finds ill-conceived aid programmes operating in a vacuum of local knowledge and understanding caused by decades of deep cuts to Britain’s foreign service; then as prisons minister, Stewart is profoundly shocked both by conditions in some of England’s prisons – the filth, the violence, the pervasive drug culture – and by the dazed state of the civil servants, mouthing “an imprecise and evasive liturgy” of management-speak, in a department which had suffered savage cuts since 2010. Surprisingly, he relished his time as prisons minister, managing to reduce drug and violence figures in 10 jails. But you are changing far more lives now – one stroke of a pen on plastic bags has changed the behaviour of millions. Stewart likens then chancellor George Osborne to an “18th-century cardinal”, “capable of breathtaking cynicism”, but also bright, engaged and self-mocking. But ultimately the forces that be prevail and we endure the last chapter of this book hoping, that at least in this version of history, our hero defeats the Brexit demons.

Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within - Hardcover - AbeBooks Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within - Hardcover - AbeBooks

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.In short, the problem – as diagnosed by May and Stewart – is not in fact anything to do with the institutional “abuse of power” or the systematic eschewal of expertise. Long passages in this chapter advocate for all the merits of the agreement – its sensitivity to Ireland, its best-of-both-worlds problem-solving. In his memoir Politics on the Edge he confesses: “I had once dreamt of modelling myself on a classical hero, a Victorian image of a gentleman, austere, with a prickly sense of honour: keen to work, perhaps even die, for one’s country .

Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart: a centrist lament Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart: a centrist lament

In it, she chronicles miserable episodes in the country’s recent history – hopping between the Hillsborough disaster, sex abuse scandals, Brexit and modern slavery. It’s just one insiders view and I’m sure other people have other stories to tell, but it does expose the disaster of Conservative rule and the inability of politicians to really lead for the nation rather than serve themselves. Unsure really why the time leading up to Stewart’s departure from parliament following the election of Boris Johnson, including Stewart’s removal from the Conservative Party, is not included. Finally, Stewart becomes Secretary of State for International Development; but by this time, the party is riven by a Brexit debate increasingly dominated by a small group of right-wing extremists who want nothing less than a no-deal hard Brexit.An enigma clad occasionally in a kilt, and boasting a storied background comprising stints in the Middle East, Rory Stewart was never going to be constrained by the typical stereotypes for a Tory MP. After his own stint in the armed forces, he worked as an administrator in post-war Iraq, and as a charity boss in Afghanistan. As a result, he was entirely unsuited to modern politics, and his campaign to become PM in 2019 ended in swift and crushing failure.