Politics on the edge

[Strangeways Prison in Manchester, as snapped by the Daily Mirror in 2013]

I have now got through the memoir at reference 1 advertised at reference 2. As politicians’ memoirs go, a short, easy read. An agreeable book by what appears to be an agreeable and decent chap with prodigious energy. Keen on long walks in the hills, some very long, but also keen on meeting people. Good at organising people. Good with his mouth. A sufferer from migraines. Might be a bit much at close quarters. Also fond of Latin tags and such like, rather in the way of his arch-enemy, Johnson. A Conservative, although tainted by Labour when little.

Public service father. Born in Hong Kong. Eton, Oxford, Diplomatic service, including serious time in Iraq as a provincial governor. Kabul for a few years to run a heritage operation. Taught at Harvard. MP. Chair of Defence Select Committee. Parliamentary Under Secretary. Minister of State (3 departments). Cabinet Minister. Lost out in the leadership contest won by Johnson and subsequently expelled from the party. Left politics shortly thereafter. Taught at Yale. Founded a popular news podcast with Alistair Campbell. For which see references 4 and 5 – not that I have yet got past the trailers which seem to be at the front of each episode. But then, I don’t have a clue about the worlds of either Apple or podcasts and, that apart, I generally prefer the written word to the spoken word, never mind the televised word. These dialogues faked up for the cameras.

The book comes with stuff at the beginning, with six parts organised into 26 chapters and quite a lot of stuff at the end. For example, a glossary for those unfamiliar with the arcana of our public life. Don't know about pages as I read the book on my Kindle.

Some stray observations

Politicians don’t just lie and economise with the truth with the public, they seem to be just as bad with each other. But maybe it goes with the territory and lying only counts as a venial sin; not something you refuse an invitation to dinner over.

Being a proper constituency MP in the far north and, at the same time, spending quality time in London sounds pretty gruelling. You are going to spend a lot of time travelling and you are going to have a lot of late nights.

The details of an MP’s life at Westminster sound both tiresome and silly. Inadequate facilities and a great deal of time wasted on arcane rituals which achieve very little. Some of which comes with our two party system. Compounded by lots of MPs being much more concerned with climbing up the greasy pole than doing their job. Does political life really have to be like this? A nice anecdote about traditional MPs who thought that representing their constituents was enough, was an honourable and useful position. While being a Minister was a bit low; far too much creeping and crawling involved for decent people. 

Stewart had what seems like four junior ministerial appointments in as many years. Junior positions but positions with complicated briefs. In keeping with the British tradition that an Oxbridge degree is sufficient qualification for anything that life might throw at one; that a gifted amateur will do better than the veteran with set views and tunnel vision. I am reminded of the disputes which started more or less as soon as we had a navy in the seventeenth century about the wisdom of appointing captains to ships – not to say admirals – for their connections rather than for their naval skills. As witnessed by Pepys. And Wellington still had the same problem when it came to Waterloo.

Very hard for a minister to keep his head above water, to make headway against permanent civil servants who perhaps resented this succession of amateurs thrust upon them. Best just to keep them in their bubbles and get on with the real work somewhere else. Perhaps, indeed, with set views and tunnel vision. Stewart has a nasty anecdote about an old-school infantry commander getting his men to march slowly up the D-day beaches, line abreast in first world war style, right up against the machine guns. Men who had been trained to something better by his father.

I was reminded that Corbyn and his Brexit man Starmer (now Prime Mininster in waiting) stood aside while the May Brexit compromise collapsed. If they had delivered Labour support for what seemed at the time like a reasonable compromise between strongly held but opposing views, the country might have been spared a lot of downstream pain. Maybe the Democrats in the US have fallen down this same hole over the House of Representative’s Speaker. The imperatives of two party politics trump those of the country.

In his telling, Stewart tried hard to tell the truth as he saw it – unlike the great majority of his colleagues, more interested in easy reading and sugar coating for the punters. For example, that Brexit without an agreement was a very bad outcome. That tax cuts in the near term were not going to be possible. And that we had to do something about the dreadful state of some of our public services – not least our disgraceful prisons, of which he had acquired intimate knowledge.

That both parties made a bad mistake in opening up their leadership contests to voting by party members. The closed shop of election by serving MPs had its faults, but at least it was less likely to result in a very bad outcome than allowing party members, not very representative of the population at large and all too easily led up garden paths, in on the act. But not a cat which can easily be put back in the bag. Rather different problems in the US with their directly elected presidents.

Conclusions

An interesting read. All rather depressing in that the way we do politics here in the UK sounds pretty dreadful – but it is not at all clear to me how one is going to do better. Maybe politics is always going to be a dirty game when seen at close quarters.

From where I associate to all the fudges and kludges in the work of even good building tradesmen. But there, the customer does not usually notice: it takes the eye of the chap who did the work, or at least that of one who knows the work, to notice.

References

Reference 1: Politics on the edge: A memoir from within – Rory Stewart – 2023.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-first-reading.html. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Stewart. Touched up by the man himself!

Reference 4: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-rest-is-politics/id1611374685. 

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rest_is_Politics.