Rory Stewart has been many things: a solider, a writer, a diplomat, a professor, among them. And in 2009, he decided to add to the list: He moved home to Britain, leaving his prestigious teaching post at Harvard, to run for Parliament as a Conservative.
Now he is out with a memoir about his misbegotten foray into British politics in the age of Brexit and of populist nationalism around the world. It’s called How Not to be a Politician. I got to speak with Rory the other day about his experience going into the bowels of democracy, and why it made him believe less, not more, in the system.
This is a bracing conversation in many ways, and I have left as much of what he said in the transcript below, because I think he is sounding a warning many of us would rather not hear: that democracy hasn’t just got some bad leaders right now, dangerous movements right now, inept pro-democracy movements right now. But, rather, that there is something intrinsic to all of this. That certain structural features of the modern world will inevitably give us the kind of politics we are getting — and that, absent radical, transformative change, we shouldn’t be expecting anything else.
Check it out, and tell me what you think below in the comments.
“It’s much worse than people who don’t work in the business understand”: a conversation with Rory Stewart
In 2009, you left a prestigious teaching post at Harvard for an experiment in joining British politics. Why did you do that?
I remember at the time a lot of Americans saying to me, “Why would you throw this in to be a backbench MP?” But of course, if I’d said I was going off to be a U.S. Senator, they’d never say, “Why are you doing that?” Because it would be sort of self-evident to Americans why you would want to be a senator.
I think that suggests something which is interesting about the way in which the British Parliament has declined, in terms of its own confidence and its sense of itself, that most Brits also said to me, “Why would you do that? Why on earth would you become a member of Parliament?” British people would say it, not just Americans. And I think it’s worrying.
For all the problems in American politics, people still take it for granted that people would want to be congresspeople and senators. Whereas in Britain, politics now seems so — not just unpleasant, but slightly marginal and irrelevant.
Do you think that sense that people have is out of step with the reality — and that the British Parliament really does have great influence over public life? Or is it, in some ways, a correct reading of a decline in influence?
I think in some ways it’s correct, and it may also be, actually, more true of the U.S. than you want to acknowledge, sadly. Probably being a congressperson is not as substantial and influential as you’d like to believe.
When I was at Yale, I was talking to a congresswoman who was from Connecticut, who’d calculated how many hours she had spent on fundraising calls in two years. That amount of time didn’t leave much time for policy. And I think with congresspeople, and even some senators, when I really kick back and talk to them about what they’re actually achieving, it’s much more limited than anyone wants to say publicly.
I mean, it’s true that if you were to interview most of my colleagues in Parliament, they’d be a bit defensive about this, because it’s your life’s work. And it’s democracy, and so you want to say, idealistically, and in terms of your own self-respect, This is incredibly important and I’m changing the world. I’ve done this for my constituency. So every congressperson would be able to come up with a narrative.
But the truth of the matter is, if you actually look at what a legislator does in the United States or in any European country, so much of your time is party nonsense, dealing with the whips, campaigning, trying to get reelected, and in some cases trying to raise some money to get reelected, that there is precious little time for thinking deeply about policy.
The gap between Plato’s idea of a philosopher-king and the reality of the life of a legislator is pretty stark.
Tell me about starting to feel that reality yourself. You had worked as a diplomat and in other capacities, but when you ran and won, and then were a minister at some point, did you feel yourself starting to be pulled into a different mold of person? For someone like you, who likes to think and reflect, what was it like getting into a space where those were not things that maybe you had time for?
It’s deeply bruising for your mind, your body, and your soul. First, the mindset of campaigning and party standoff is all about simplification, clear dividing lines, three-word slogans. It’s antithetical toward what we normally think of as critical thinking, because critical thinking is about complexity and nuance and humility — and listening to other people and admitting when you’re wrong — and you can’t do any of those things when you’re campaigning.
The media landscape was more forgiving even 30 years ago, 20 years ago. But, increasingly, you put on a mask to get elected, and you think you can take it off once you’re in the cabinet room.
But the truth is, the mask is infected with poison, and you take it off, and your face is being corroded by what you’ve done, and you feel your colleagues losing the capacity to think clearly, because they’re so used to sounding confident and bold and clear.
That’s a very interesting point — that the mask sticks with you. When you were in those rooms, what did that look like in practice?
One of the best examples is Covid.
As Covid hit Italy and Milan very hard, very early, in February of 2020, we could see that we must be about two weeks behind Italy, and yet we were not shutting the flights coming out of Italy. In fact, Boris Johnson was letting the Cheltenham races go forward, with hundreds of thousands of people gathered. The chief medical officer was out saying, “Masks don’t work.”
And I felt that the problem was that my colleagues sitting around the cabinet table then were incentivized to just hope this thing was going to go away. And Boris Johnson, who’s the most extreme example of a campaigning politician, simply didn’t have the mental discipline to spend eight hours talking carefully to people.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.