A Feigned Reluctance

The age of nationalist populism is the age of the antipolitician, a type we have come to recognize. The exemplar is of course the newly reelected Donald Trump, but the likes of Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, and Boris Johnson have deployed the same shtick: breaking the conventions of political language and behavior to signal that they are not like the others, that they share the voters’ contempt for the system and the status quo. Ordinarily, the antipolitician is assumed to be a creature peculiar to the nationalist right, poking and jabbing at the so-called establishment and supposed elite, trampling on democratic norms and niceties such as the rule of law and the truth. But that is to miss a different, rarer strain of antipolitician, one that is less noisy and therefore easily overlooked.

Its exponents are cerebral, often straight out of the academy, cosmopolitan, and reflective: the vibes of Barack Obama, if not always the charisma. Not of the right, nor are they exactly of the left. Instead politicians of this stripe speak for what they describe as the “radical,” “vital,” or even “muscular” center. Their animating creed is a liberal ideal that they fear is in peril. But what they have most in common is a style or, perhaps more accurately, a temperament.

These liberal antipoliticians are capable of playing the electoral game, even as they signal their awareness of and impatience with its absurdities. Like Johnson and, less obviously, Trump, they offer their audience a knowing wink, as if to register their understanding that this photo op or that campaign appearance—and indeed the whole business of photo ops and campaign appearances—is vaguely ridiculous. Still, they play along, trusting that their most committed supporters understand that they do so solely because there is something larger and nobler at stake.

Only when out of the game can they finally admit their frustrations with politics, their self-doubt, even their self-loathing at the accommodations they made with its demands. They are thoughtful people for whom the bending and dissembling, the small dishonesties and pretenses, were a source of pain. Obama’s presidential memoir, A Promised Land, is full of such introspection—he wondered if his was a “blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service”—though the text that perhaps best captures the liberal antipolitician ethos is Michael Ignatieff’s Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, whose very title contains the intense self-criticism that distinguishes such volumes from standard political memoirs, in the same way that their authors stand apart from ordinary seekers of high office.

In that book, the former Harvard professor, Booker-shortlisted novelist, and onetime host of a late-night BBC TV arts show charted his doomed attempt to become prime minister of Canada, never sparing himself the lash. He castigated his own vanity and “hubris,” but also his failings as a retail politician: he tended, for example, to glance down or away when meeting new people, an awkward habit when voters like to look a potential leader in the eye.

Now there is an addition to the field, supplied by the former UK cabinet minister Rory Stewart. Titled Politics on the Edge in its UK edition, it comes with added self-deprecation in the US, where it appears as How Not to Be a Politician. If it nestles nicely alongside Ignatieff’s memoir, that is scarcely a surprise. Stewart took over Ignatieff’s chair at Harvard, in the field of human rights, when the latter headed north to try his hand at politics. The two are friends and fellow scholar-adventurers—each man has known the intensity of a war zone—and both have been contributors to these pages. When Stewart contemplates standing for a seat in the House of Commons, it’s Ignatieff’s advice he seeks. In return he gets both encouragement and a warning. “There is a lot of gripping hands and putting on shit-eating smiles,” Ignatieff tells him.

But it also tests your capacity for self-knowledge in a way, teaches you things about yourself, that nothing else can. It is a chance to stop being a spectator, to leave the stands and get in the game.

Many years later, when Stewart mounts his own attempt at the top job, he seeks Ignatieff’s counsel again. The latter’s reply is perceptive about his friend, but much of it could apply equally well to himself and any other member of the fraternity of intellectual antipoliticians: “You don’t want people to come away thinking that you believe you are too clever for this sordid game.”

Some will come away from this book holding precisely that view. But en route they will have learned much about Stewart, and much, too, about today’s Conservative Party, the state of contemporary Britain, and the nature of modern democratic politics—little of it good.

Abasic entry requirement for the caste of enlightened, apparently reluctant politicians is an elegant prose style. Stewart certainly has that. Unlike with most ministerial memoirs, there is no need to check if the words on the page are the author’s own work. The voice is distinct, even idiosyncratic. He has a keen eye for nature—those unfamiliar with the vocabulary of the English, or Scottish, countryside might want to keep a dictionary handy—and for the human. He observes of Nicholas Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill, that “His tie was funereally dark, and thick as a horse blanket,” while a wordless look from Boris Johnson is “the anxious half-grin of a toddler who has been caught splashing bathwater.”

He observes with detachment what is ludicrous in politics, even when he’s at the center of it, whether that’s jostling with rivals in a literal cattle market for the Conservative nomination in his rural, Cumbrian parliamentary district or perching on an unsteady stool under too-hot lights for a TV debate in the contest to become Tory leader and prime minister in 2019. (Johnson would beat Stewart and several others to seize the keys to Number 10.)

He is scathingly clear on the impotence of so many in politics, including himself. When he’s an MP he feels useless, just another bloviator in a “talking shop.” As a minister he is subordinate to more senior colleagues in, say, the Ministry of Justice or the Foreign Office, and further constrained by the career civil servants who really run the show. When he seeks to become Tory leader it’s in part because he has concluded that, in the UK system, there really is only one person who can make the changes that matter and might endure; everyone else is limited to tinkering at the edges. It is a chronicle of frustration.

Yet all this comes with reminders of Stewart’s own prodigious talent and experience. He arrives in Westminster with an almost comically stellar résumé. He had briefly been an officer in the British army, during a gap year between secondary school and Oxford, then joined the Foreign Office as a diplomat, spending time overseas in what is often assumed to be a stint as a spy. Following the 2003 invasion, he served, aged thirty, as a deputy governor of an Iraqi province. He then spent the best part of two years walking across Asia, including Afghanistan, which became the subject of a prize-winning book, before founding and running a charity in Kabul. And so when he becomes irritated at British diplomats and their failure to learn the local languages, he can’t help but remind us of his own proficiency in that department. (“A young Afghan came over and we spoke a little in Dari.”) Other MPs are mere voting fodder, assenting to legislation they haven’t read, while he digs in at the Commons library, mastering every subclause of an important bill. He insists on traveling to the tough places and diving in, whether in sub-Saharan Africa or the flooded streets of provincial England. In the sense that the author is the hero of almost every anecdote, this is a more conventional political memoir than it thinks.

To be sure, there is self-criticism aplenty. He castigates himself for pomposity, for lacking the courage to call out Conservative government policy—including the “careless machismo” of budget cuts to essential public services in the post-2010 years of austerity—or the racism of colleagues, and for the shallowness of his own manifesto when he seeks the party leadership. He sees in himself the same vices he loathes in his fellow MPs: “I was unsettled by how similar I was to all these people: with my own versions of snobbery, obsessions, envy and anxiety about promotions.”

But much of what appears to be self-flagellation is in fact a lamentation for his failure to triumph in a field he regards as despicable. It offers the implication spotted by Ignatieff—that “you are too clever for this sordid game”—that also hovered around Obama. To say that you can’t quite manage the required level of superficiality or sycophancy is not a confession so much as a humblebrag. And Stewart is adept at that particular form, more than once offering a howl of despair at Westminster life that also contains a little boast:

As I developed a reputation, I felt that I was being overvalued for things I did not value, such as my ability to remember facts and speak at the despatch box without notes, and undervalued for things I rated, such as my judgements on Afghanistan, my work in Cumbria, or my operational management of the Prison Service.

All of which many liberals and even progressives find entirely forgivable in Stewart—who now cohosts a successful podcast, The Rest Is Politics, that has become required listening among those gently mocked as “centrist dads”—because when his party began its descent into nationalist populism he stood defiant on the other side. He voted against Brexit and resisted Boris Johnson’s attempt, once installed in Downing Street, to bulldoze it through a reluctant and divided Parliament, trampling on assorted democratic norms in the process. While the Republicans had their Never Trump wing, so Conservatives had their Never Boris cadre—and Rory Stewart was one of its most eloquent advocates.

Some readers will echo the question asked by many of those who first became aware of Stewart when he joined the anti-Johnson alliance: Why exactly was he ever a Tory in the first place? His views were liberal and internationalist; as prisons minister, he was a reformer. He conspicuously cared about the weak and the downtrodden, whether that meant setting up an NGO in Afghanistan or demanding decent internet services for a forgotten corner of rural England. How did a man like that end up among the jingoist Brussels-bashers typified by Boris Johnson? Surely he would have fit in neatly in the Labour Party of Gordon Brown, prime minister when Stewart made the move into politics in 2009. So why did he throw in his lot with the Conservatives?

To his credit, Stewart addresses that question, even if his answer leaves the impression that his parliamentary career sprang less from lifelong conviction than from hardheaded calculation, weighing up the options. He tells us that he had indeed been a member of the Labour Party at eighteen and had voted for the centrist Liberal Democrats in 1997. When he contemplated becoming an MP he confesses that:

I was closer, I knew, to Labour positions on immigration, and criminal justice, the Civil Service and probably poverty…. But I blamed the Labour government [of Tony Blair] for what I had seen in Iraq…. I was suspicious of big government and the obsession of progressive think tanks with inappropriate and inapplicable models from Scandinavia.

The paltriness of that last objection is a tell. The explanation for Stewart’s decision to sign up for the Tories has more to do with timing and tradition, power and class, than it does with irritation at Labour’s excessive enthusiasm for Norwegian approaches to childcare.

Start with the timing. The year was 2009, and Stewart wanted a career in government. Of course he wasn’t going to join Labour, then at the tail end of a thirteen-year administration and clearly bound for a long spell in impotent opposition. If he wanted to wield power, the only rational choice was the Conservatives. Blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service.

And Stewart’s class made it an easy, natural fit. “I had grown up revering the military, the monarchy, and many aspects of traditional Britain, with which my Labour friends had little sympathy,” he writes. “I was perhaps if not a Conservative, then at least a Tory.”

At first, he seemed to have got the timing just right. Stewart entered Parliament in 2010 just as David Cameron entered Downing Street, having dislodged the Labour government of Blair and Brown. Cameroon Conservatism, as it became known, set out to make the Tory Party palatable to younger, more moderate, often suburban voters, and was at pains to signal its comfort with the social liberalism of the age. It was Cameron who legalized same-sex marriage in the UK, later declaring it one of his proudest achievements.

And Cameron—like Stewart and indeed Johnson—was an Old Etonian, one who, again like Stewart, presented as more of a Tory than a Conservative: for all the talk of modernization, Cameron looked and sounded like a Tory of the old school whose guiding stars were tradition, countryside, and an unspoken sense of noblesse oblige. (Such is Stewart’s commitment to tradition, even of the invented variety, that he dressed up for the coronation of King Charles III in a vaguely Ruritanian coat that turned out to be the long-forgotten uniform of the Privy Council, a body whose origins lie in the thirteenth century.) In practice, Cameron pursued an agenda of Thatcherite state-shrinking austerity, in the name of taming the post-crash budget deficit and with scant regard for the poorest. Even so, Cameron’s comfort with both contemporary social mores and the wider world—sticking faithfully to his promise to spend 0.7 percent of the GDP on overseas aid, for example—meant the Conservative Party remained a congenial enough home for Stewart. But then came the Brexit vote of June 2016.

Following the Leavers’ victory, the Conservative Party devoted itself to, and became consumed by, a project that was anything but Tory. It no longer cherished continuity, preferring to sever European ties that had been steadily nurtured over the previous half-century. It no longer regarded the union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as sacred—even though unionism was once a defining faith of what is still officially the Conservative and Unionist Party—instead happily pursuing a course that threatens the survival of the United Kingdom by jeopardizing, for different reasons, the place of both Scotland and Northern Ireland within it. (Majorities in both those places voted against Brexit in the referendum.)

For a while, the likes of Stewart tried to hold the line, implementing an exit from the EU that they hadn’t voted for and didn’t believe in, in the name of honoring the democratic decision of the public. Cameron was gone, replaced by fellow Remainer Theresa May, and Stewart served her in various junior ministerial positions, backing her efforts to craft a Brexit that somehow did the people’s bidding without wrecking the country’s economy and global standing. But it would prove an impossible task. Though hardly few in number, May and the others were pulled down by the riptide of Brexit. Just weeks after May had finally given Stewart the cabinet job for which he had waited nearly a decade, in May 2019 she announced her resignation. Once she had gone, and once Boris Johnson had won the contest to replace her, Stewart did not hang around. He quit the government, having vowed, as soon as May stepped down, that he would not serve under Johnson. He returned to the backbenches, increasingly appalled by what Johnson and the government he led were willing to do.

The new Brexit-centric Conservative Party was even prepared to move against the holiest of Tory institutions: the monarchy. Unable to get MPs to approve his EU withdrawal plan, Johnson persuaded the late Queen Elizabeth to grant him a prorogation of Parliament—effectively locking MPs out of the chamber and suspending the country’s legislature. It was a rank abuse of power, one that critics believed the Queen would have approved only if she had been misled. Weeks later, in a unanimous verdict, the UK Supreme Court struck down Johnson’s action as unlawful. Old-school Tories like Stewart were mortified to see that it was now their party, apparently drunk on revolutionary fervor, that was ready to rip up deep-rooted conventions and upend enduring institutions, all in the name of an abstract, ideological vision. The right had always considered such monomaniacal contempt for what was, in the pursuit of what might be, as the great failing of the left. Now, thanks to Brexit, the Conservatives had become what they once reviled.

Perhaps what galled Stewart and his Tory allies most, just as it infuriated their Never Trump counterparts in the Republican Party, was the flight from truth. The embodiment of the malaise was Boris Johnson, whom Stewart regards as a “tricky confidence artist,” a “Pinocchio” with “dishonest” politics comprised of an “alchemic blend of omission, denial, self-exoneration and fabrication.”

He might also have mentioned humor, which was a secret weapon for Johnson just as it remains for Trump.¹ US readers are likely to think of Trump when Stewart reflects that Johnson was dangerous precisely because “he alone could cloak a darker narrative in clowning.” Both men allowed and, in Trump’s case, still allow “the public to indulge ever more offensive opinions under the excuse that some of it might be a joke.”

Britons stopped seeing the funny side in the aftermath of the pandemic, when it emerged that Johnson had broken the very lockdown rules he and his government had imposed so stringently on an extraordinarily compliant public.² While everyone else, including the monarch, obeyed the injunction to keep their distance, even staying away from loved ones in their dying hours, it turned out that Johnson’s Downing Street was party central: staff brought in so much booze they had to pack the bottles in wheeled suitcases. “Partygate,” both the rule-breaking and Johnson’s lies about it, destroyed public faith in the Conservative government. Their once formidable polling cratered, only to sink yet further during the forty-odd-day premiership of Liz Truss, the PM who will forever be remembered as having been outlasted by a wilting head of lettuce. The Tories’ standing did not recover under Rishi Sunak—the fifth Conservative leader since 2016—and the party was duly crushed in the July 4 election, defeated in a landslide by the Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, returned to power for the first time in fourteen years.

Those events lie outside the scope of Stewart’s book, which ends in 2019, when he and twenty other Conservative MPs were expelled by Johnson for voting with opposition parties on a measure to block a “no-deal Brexit”—by which the UK would have left the EU with no agreed trade terms, so pushing the British economy off a cliff. But the steady slide toward Conservative ruin—Stewart witnessed most of that.

For Americans, Never Trumpers especially, there may be consolation in reading this tale. It reminds them that they are not alone, that many center-right parties have suffered the same fate, eclipsed or devoured by aggressive nationalist populism. Bad as the Johnson era was, however, it never quite descended into the Trumpian mire. There was no January 6. And, in the end, Johnson’s fellow Conservatives turned on him and removed him. When the Republicans had their chance to do the same, following Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021, their members in Congress—in the Senate especially—failed to do their duty.

And though Stewart and so many others have gone, the tradition they represented has not wholly been extinguished. There are still two sides in the battle for the soul of the Conservative Party, even if the autumn contest to choose Sunak’s successor as leader confirmed how lopsided that battle has become. In the end, the last two candidates left standing represented different flavors of the right, differences of emphasis in the culture wars against “woke” and migrants. On November 2, Kemi Badenoch was named the winner, becoming the first Black leader of a major UK party. Naturally, she had been on the Brexit side in the 2016 referendum. Even so the Conservative Party’s nationalist populists do not—yet—have the field wholly to themselves. The contrast with today’s GOP, where liberal Republicans of the old-school, Rockefeller variety are an extinct rather than endangered species, is plain.

Still, that will be scant solace for Stewart. The grief that runs through his book is not for his party only. It is for his country. He is struck by the impoverished, enfeebled state of a once mighty power. A ministerial promotion takes him into the Foreign Office, where he has meetings in rooms big enough to hold a costumed ball, under domed ceilings ornately carved and decorated—all the while knowing that Britain’s international influence is now at the margins, especially after the country’s exit from the EU. The trappings are still there, but in Africa, for example, he finds British embassies shuttered or UK development teams that amount to a handful of overstretched people with a couple of Land Rovers and a mission statement taped to the wall. At one point he muses that the thousand-year-old Westminster Hall is “like the shell of a hollow oak,” but he could be speaking of Britain itself.

Among both governors and governed, the delusion persists that Britain remains the force it once was. There has been little adjustment to accommodate the post-1945 reality. Instead, the country he describes is the Norma Desmond nation, with an old Rolls Royce in the garage, polished and ready, insisting to itself that it is still big. That fantasy, powered by imperial nostalgia, left too many Britons susceptible to the magical thinking of the Brexiters, including their promise that Britain could put up barriers with its nearest neighbors, thereby making trade with its biggest market harder, and somehow come out richer—or that Britons could leave the EU but still enjoy “the exact same benefits” of EU membership, as one pro-Leave Conservative famously pledged. It was a flight from reality.

Given all that, it becomes clear why Stewart could not persist as a Conservative. The breaking point was surely not the parliamentary deadlock over Brexit that saw his formal expulsion, but rather the Brexit referendum itself three years earlier. That was when his party moved away from facts and evidence and embraced a new faith: that the real world, even the hard, stubborn facts of geography, can be ignored or bent to your will, just by closing your eyes and wishing it were so. We might call this creed Brexitism.

Again, Stewart’s disenchantment is not confined to one political party, but rather to the state of British governance. A stint as the minister responsible for prisons in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland are run separately) leaves him dispirited by the degree of violence, the ubiquity of drugs—sometimes delivered by drone into the hands of prisoners, their arms outstretched from cell windows—and the suicide rate, which is more than six times higher in most jails than among the general population. But he is no less outraged by the failure of public administration that allowed such a situation.

The “squalid ineptitude of British government” appalls him. How can it be right that an MP who is selected to be in charge of, say, national parks is promoted a few months later to run, say, UK policy in the Middle East? Stewart is given authority over areas that he knows nothing about—and this, he is adamant, is no way for a grown-up country to manage itself.

He has contempt for the media’s fixation on the trivial and the personal, even when he learns how to manipulate that fixation to his advantage. Social media is no better, and again his disdain is not softened by his eventual acquisition of the relevant skills. When seeking the Tory leadership, he is filmed delivering a video message, but the cameraman persuades him to hold up his arm so that it looks like a selfie. He is caught out and admits to the deception, but

rather than wrecking my campaign, selfie-gate now accelerated it. Viewers seemed to find my admission of faking, or even my faking itself, authentic. I was benefiting, I sensed, from the same forces that rewarded Boris for his incompetent and transparent dishonesty.

Stewart discovered that, in contemporary politics, the liar who is brazen about his lies is seen as refreshingly honest, while the honest candidate who errs, but fails to brag about it, is the liar. He can stomach it only so long.

Which is, perhaps, why most antipolitical careers end in failure. The reluctant, introspective, intellectual pol can flourish for a while; they can even capture the imagination, especially of those voters who pride themselves on not falling for anything so shallow as charisma. But they rarely win. (To the extent that Obama belonged to that fraternity, he was always more exception than rule.) Instead they learn about themselves and the societies they hoped to change, and we learn with them. The actual business of effecting change, of making things happen, seems to fall to those hewn from a different timber—those, perhaps, like America’s outgoing president, who express themselves best in the usually inelegant prose of governing, those who are less philosopher, more king. The misfortune of the Conservative Party, and the tragedy of Britain, is that its most recent leaders were neither, but belonged instead to two less noble categories—either fools or knaves.