Cumbria’s
suicide rate is 50% higher than the national average. Among the county’s farming community, it’s
higher still. Hang on to these facts,
because they’re important later in this piece.
All celebrities
are psychologically damaged; celebrity politicians dangerously so. Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics
On The Edge is subtitled Notes From Inside, possibly a nod to
Dostoyevsky but both labels are ambiguous. His account of his time as MP for
Penrith & the Borders and as a minister under Cameron and May is not just
about the challenges of representing a constituency at the overlooked edge of
England. It’s also about operating within a system of governance so
dysfunctional that, if Stewart’s experience is an accurate indicator, it’s very
possibly now beyond any kind of reform (& most definitely beyond the moronic
opportunism of the capitalised variety).
The
subtitle is a more interesting double, or just possibly quadruple, entendre. It’s not only that Stewart very obviously has
a miserably frustrating time of things as successively a backbencher, committee
chair, junior minister and cabinet minister. His plans for change are
frustrated at every turn (as I write this, news stories about wrongly released
prisoners make it clear that all of the problems he identified as prisons
minister 10 years ago persist today, and none of the solutions he championed have
delivered change). He makes no secret of
his belief that change can only be successfully implemented from the very top –
ideally by Prime Minister Rory Stewart who, it is implied, would have been a sort
of benevolent governor of HMP Whitehall, bringing education and reformation to
the chronic re-offending of the long-term inmates of an institution that’s
clearly part open prison, part secure unit hospital.
The
subtitle also promises or at least implies some degree of interiority from the
author and that is where the memoir becomes genuinely intriguing. One expects
all politicians’ propensity for lies, evasion and half-truth to originate in deception
of the self: they and not their electorate are the real first victims of dysfunctional
ambition and self-promotion. What we get
is the visible agony of a serious commitment to public service attempting to
find its way through a world focused on the celebrity narcissism of showbiz for
ugly people. Perhaps we should not be
surprised by how little he achieved, rather that he got so far and lasted so
long. Stewart has a notably low opinion
of almost everyone he encounters at Westminster (full disclosure – one of the
very few people he has a good word for is a long-standing friend of mine; I
have never discussed Stewart with him). Conversely,
and oddly, it soon becomes obvious that almost everyone Rory encounters in turn
takes a decided dislike to him. It’s striking
that he offers no insight into why this should be the case. When asked
rhetorically by a friend and ally that he must surely know why, he repeatedly disclaims
all understanding. Perhaps its no more
than the fact that he’s committed two long-term cardinal sins for a Tory and a
toff – those of being egregious, and of
being unapologetically clever. If so,
neither of these trouble him as possible explanations.
There is
however a moment where the ignored and unmanageable suddenly come up close and
personal, when Stewart baldly admits there was a time that he considered
suicide. We should, I think, take this
claim profoundly seriously rather than dismiss it as the performative self-dramatisation
of a public schoolboy caught out in the
manner of Richard Branson at Stowe. (There
is not so much as a distant echo of “And then you’ll all be sorry”, the usual end-point
of such cases). The occasion was a
maliciously selective quotation in the press that gave the impression, falsely,
of a snob’s disdain for the poorer sort of farmers who were the backbone of
traditional Tory support in his constituency, and he was clearly utterly
mortified by what it might be thought to reveal about him. This moment is made all the darker by the complete
absence, anywhere in the book, of any mention or awareness of the epidemic of
suicide (see above) in that community and in his wider constituency.
What we do
get is the gradual revelation of an elusive pathological hinterland in which
political struggles are made unbearable by crippling attacks of migraine. He is an avid exponent of the Walking Cure - long
tramps through constituency and borderland that are probably not so much fact-finding
missions as self-medicating ministrations of his own interior. One is tempted to
shake him by the shoulders and demand “But Rory, what exactly is it that you
are walking away from in such a brisk and purposeful manner?” I suspect that this would elicit the same null
return as the ‘Surely you know why?’ question above.
Does any of
this, in the context of a bestselling political memoir, really matter? Well, up to a point or two, yes it does.
First
point: Stewart is still a shaper of political attitudes amongst the
bien-pensant podcast-consuming classes via his lucrative sideline The Rest Is Politics.
(Shorter version of his take on being a neo-colonial administrator in an
unstable satrapy – “You have to ask yourself – who do I shoot first?”). Second
point: in Cumbria rumours abound that Stewart intends to run as an independent
candidate in the 2027 election for Cumberland and Westmorland’s strategic
mayor. I have little in common politically
with either Tories or toffs, but it could well be that if he runs he could win
and be a decently good holder of the office. Stewart is clearly one of nature’s
District Commissioners – and the job of strategic mayor of a remote, impoverished
region with complex problems that have chronically escaped the solutions of
conventional Westminster would probably quite suit his blend of individuality,
intellect and bloody-minded persistence.
He would, I guess, get a decently strong personal vote, plus those of
the excluded middle who with the collapse of both Conservatives and Labour locally
want to ensure that Reform UK Ltd’s coalition of the whining are not allowed
anywhere near the levers of power, as well as the 2nd preferences of
those prepared to tolerate a winner so long as he’s not ‘one of that other lot’,
whoever that lot may be. And that may just constitute a coalition of the winning.
If he runs
and if he succeeds then I very much hope that he will treat as his first
priority the mayor’s strategic responsibility for health and wellbeing and
bring his considerable talents and energy to bear upon the problem of Cumbria’s
bloody epidemic of suicide and self-harm. Our people have suffered more than enough.