Rory stewart

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

A revival of Alan Bennett’s early work is long overdue

It is a curious literary form, the published diary. A surprising number of the classic diarists did write for eventual, usually posthumous, publication – Chips Channon under a 60-year embargo, A.C. Benson, Samuel Butler, in his wonderful notebooks, and surely the possibility was in the minds of Samuel Pepys and the Duc de Saint-Simon. More recently, great diaries have been published within the author’s lifetime. James Lees-Milne’s first instalment came out 30 years after the period it described. Alan Clark’s initial offering, covering 1983-92, appeared in 1993. Tony Benn’s hilariously tedious volumes emerged on a rolling programme which slowly caught up with the events they described. They promise intimacy but

Friday

Michael Gove

Q&A: Rory Stewart vs Dominic Cummings – the problem with political prophets

30 min listen

This week: Michael and Maddie examine the rise of the Green party and ask whether it represents a passing protest vote or a genuine realignment on the British left. As Labour’s support continues to leak away and figures once loyal to Jeremy Corbyn drift towards the Greens, are Keir Starmer’s U-turns finally catching up with him – and how far can a ‘hipster–hobbit alliance’ really go? Then: the row between Rory Stewart and Dominic Cummings, after claims about overseas students and radicalisation in Britain were dismissed – only to be vindicated. What does the episode reveal about political forecasting, expert class overconfidence, and why some of Westminster’s most celebrated commentators

Saturday

William Atkinson

Why does anyone still take Rory Stewart seriously?

As per J. M. Barrie, one either believes in fairies, or they don’t. I take a similar approach to Rory Stewart. To his legions of Rest is Politics listeners, the ex-Tory MP, bedroom-squatter, and Afghanistan-botherer is a sage – as right-wing a voice as their timid and tiny middle-class minds can handle, successfully neutralised by co-hosting with 45-minute enthusiast Alistair Campbell. But to me he is a charlatan: another over-educated Balliol boy with a far higher opinion of himself than his public record merits. The example of his Dominic Cummings comments is a case in point. He is a charlatan: another over-educated Balliol boy with a far higher opinion of

Tuesday

Marcus Nevitt

Friends fall out in the English civil war

In April 1636, two aspiring lawyers, eager to make their way in the world, corresponded about the state of affairs in London. ‘Our best news,’ wrote Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, ‘is that we have good wine… the worse is that the Plague is in town and no Judges dye.’ The recipient of this letter was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a fellow member of the Middle Temple, who, like Hyde, would go on to write an indispensable contemporary chronicle of the British civil wars of the mid-17th century. What makes the intimate, wry irreverence of Hyde’s missive seem startling in retrospect is that the two men ended up on opposite

Tuesday

Declan Lyons

The punishing life of a chief whip

For many Spectator readers, their only exposure to the workings of the Whips’ Office will be through the machinations of Francis Urquhart, Michael Dobbs’s fictional chief whip made famous in House of Cards. In the first diaries published by a former chief whip, Simon Hart aims to shine a light on the vital and often unrecognised role that the Whips’ Office plays in the functioning of parliament and government. Having been overlooked by David Cameron and Theresa May, Hart arrives at the top table under Boris Johnson in 2019, nine years after his entry to parliament. He serves as secretary of state for Wales until he joinsa slew of others

Monday

Alec Marsh

There’s nothing toxic about centrist dads

‘Centrist dad’, a term that has been with us for a decade or so, has never exactly been a compliment. In 2017, even Tony Blair – then still pretty close to being political toxic waste – disavowed the label, declaring: ‘I’m not a centrist dad.’ In that same year a chap named Matt Zarb-Cousin, a spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn – who astonishingly was the leader of the opposition at the time – described centrist dads as ‘middle-aged men who cannot come to terms with the world and politics changing.’ Zarb-Cousin added hubristically: ‘They think they must know better because they are older and wiser.’ (Fortunately the centrist dads did know better,

Thursday

Spectator Life

What Spectator writers read in 2024

Rod Liddle The angels in Jim Crace’s Eden are tetchy and petty authoritarians, apart from one who can’t fly properly. This dissertation on freedom and mortality is rather wonderful – published two years ago but I caught up with it only this year. The best non-fiction book of the year is David Goodhart’s The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, which has the temerity to suggest that divorce rates and broken families might just have something to do with our epidemic of mental illness. How dare he? Lionel Shriver I’d recommend the novel Havoc by Christopher Bollen, set in an Egyptian hotel to which westerners have

Thursday

Jonathan Meades

A familiar OE-led balls-up: Rory Stewart’s The Long History of Ignorance reviewed

In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know: ‘where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise’ (Thomas Gray, OE). Such ignorance is a state which, happily enough, Rory Stewart, OE and a fully tooled-up Mob from rent-a-thinker (what one of those executives, without a hint of irony or faint praise, once called ‘television intellectuals’) are just now kicking around in the hope that they may rehabilitate it and release it from its sty of obloquy. Rory is a very keen type – what used to be called an all-rounder – and, despite his protestations otherwise, he is

Tuesday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Too many tales of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

A book about hedgehogs is not the obvious next step for Sarah Sands, the former editor of Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today, and before that editor of the Evening Standard. But then Sands has had a rough time of it lately. In The Hedgehog Diaries, she recounts the death of her father, Noel, the news broken to her by her brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who had to climb through a window of her Norfolk house to do so since she wasn’t answering her phone. Hesketh-Harvey, who was a writer and performer and a great favourite of the King, died not long afterwards of heart failure. Julian Sands, the actor made

Tuesday

Chris Mullin

Rory Stewart is a fish out of water

Rory Stewart is one of that almost extinct species in the modern Conservative party, a one-nation Tory. He is also – or was (until Boris Johnson kicked him out) – a politician with hinterland. He had been places and done things before getting himself elected in his late thirties, entering parliament in 2010. Disillusion rapidly set in: Too much of our time was absorbed in gossip about the promotion of one colleague or the scandal engulfing another. Even four weeks in, I sensed more impotence, suspicion, envy, resentment, claustrophobia and schadenfreude than I had seen in any other profession. It is made clear to him from the outset that rebellion

Tuesday

Angus Colwell

The hitch with Hitchens

It hasn’t taken 20 years to work out that Christopher Hitchens was a dud, but this week’s collapse of Kabul obliges us to reexamine the Hitchens back catalog — because Hitchens had an outsized influence on debates about the supersised errors of post-9/11 foreign policy. The briefest of looks exposes the deficits of the neoconservative mind. An even clearer picture emerges of the hubris that led American policymakers, and the West in general, to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the spread of liberal enlightenment, rather than subjecting them to the tests of Realpolitik. Never trust a man whose favorite sport is politics. For Hitchens and the neocons who adopted

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Neil Ferguson quits, Rory Stewart drops out and Boris names his baby

Home The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was for office workers to avoid sharing staplers and to face the wall in lifts. An Ipsos Mori poll found that 61 per cent of people would feel not very comfortable about using public transport. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, appeared at a daily coronavirus press conference and said: ‘We have come through the peak, or rather we have come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we have been going through some huge Alpine tunnel, and we can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of

Thursday

Steerpike

Rory Stewart’s meeting that should have been an email

Rory Stewart announced at a meeting today that he won’t be holding any more meetings as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. He is also cancelling all of his door-knocking and canvassing, putting a swift end to his sofa-surfing escapade. Mr S. thinks that this meeting really should have been an email.

Wednesday

Rory Stewart

How can I get Trump to be rude about me?

From Rory Stewart Q. I am running for Mayor of London, and had hoped I could get people to focus on practical questions: do you feel safer than four years ago? Is your commute better? But many seem to think the role is largely ceremonial and it is not fair to blame the current mayor when things go wrong. And many are impressed that he stood up to Trump. So my question is, how can I persuade Trump to send rude tweets about me? (If he is really rude, I might win — and thus get the chance to improve the signalling on the Piccadilly line.) A. Voters are coming

Saturday

Steerpike

Rory Stewart’s gangster fail

When Rory Stewart declared his candidacy for the London mayor, there was some concern in CCHQ that the former Conservative MP could eat into Tory candidate Shaun Bailey’s vote share. Stewart has been keen to pitch himself as an outward looking politician in touch with modern Britain. While there’s still some way to go to polling night, the initial signs suggest that Stewart’s own efforts will be no walk in the park. Stewart has found himself under criticism after he described three East London men he met back when he was campaigning to be the next leader of the Conservatives as ‘minor gangsters’. Stewart attempted to speak to the group as

Thursday

Tanya Gold

An enemy of the people? Or an above-average sandwich chain? Pret A Manger reviewed

The sandwich restaurant Pret A Manger is accused of harbouring centrists. Those are words I never thought I would type, but these are mad days. A Corbyn supporter called Aaron Bastani, the author of a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism — or, as wags call it, Luxury Space Robot Communism — has accused Rory Stewart of being unfit to be mayor of London because he likes Pret A Manger. It is, in Bastani’s mind, a sandwich-themed agent of evil, indicating a deeper evil which may or may not have something to do with wizards. I did not know that Pret A Manger’s smoked salmon sandwiches (they are quite good,

Friday

Ian Acheson

Is Rory Stewart running to become London mayor because he’s bored?

Rory Stewart’s announcement that he would run as an independent candidate for Mayor for London was typically civilised. This was no political suicide bomb. Instead Stewart waited for his erstwhile party’s conference to finish before making his move. But this trademark decency does not render his decision any less barking to his detractors. I’m on friendly terms with Stewart and had enthusiastically supported his Conservative leadership campaign which, after this abrupt defection, does leave me feeling like a bit of an arse if I’m honest. But Rory is very hard to dislike, not least because his innate decency, ability and desire to listen and respond to ordinary people is clearly authentic.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Rory Stewart stands down – but says he’s staying in politics ‘in another part of the country’

Rory Stewart has announced that he will not be re-standing as an MP at the next election and that he is also resigning his membership of the Conservative party. That Stewart is going underlines how much things have changed in the party since the leadership election. He was one of the contenders, and stayed in that contest far longer than many had expected. Having pitched to lead the party, he has now left it just months later. And he is not the first to leave: Sam Gyimah defected to the Liberal Democrats after having the Conservative whip removed, though Gyimah was never considered a serious contender in the race (in

James Kirkup

Four reasons Rory Stewart could struggle in London

Could Rory Stewart become Mayor of London, disrupt the main political parties and strike a historic blow for humane centrism and political compromise? Possibly the best reason to bet against him is that quite a lot of people like me will be arguing – and hoping – that he can win. By “people like me” I mean the commentator-class. I know what I am. I run a think-tank at Westminster and I write about politics for newspapers and magazines. I don’t belong to any political party and have voted for at least five of them in my 43 and three-quarter years. I don’t really understand tribal partisanship and I admire

Friday

Steerpike

Rory Stewart: the picture perfect politician

On Tuesday, the former Conservative MP Rory Stewart won GQ’s Politician of the Year award. It was probably the best part of the week for Stewart, who has had the Conservative whip removed and been roundly mocked after posting a series of photographs on Twitter, in which his typical grinning selfie smile disappeared when he was next to one particular individual: Thank you for coming @lozzaalaurenn and so many others to meet me at Hartlepool pic.twitter.com/j5sXARm8of — Rory Stewart (@RoryStewartUK) August 29, 2019 It was then revealed that Rory shares the modern affliction of caring deeply about his online presence, clearly liking one image on his website so much that he named