‘Being an MP was bad for my brain, body and soul’: Rory Stewart on politics, privilege and podcast stardom | Rory Stewart

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  1. Rory Stewart has long been a man out of time. At three, he named his rocking horse Bucephalus, after Alexander the Great’s famed steed. At six, he was reading Jane Austen. At 29, he walked across rural Afghanistan, dodging Taliban fighters, to emulate the derring-do of the 18th-century explorers he grew up idolising. At 30, he was made deputy governor of Maysan province during the Iraq war, effectively serving as the modern equivalent of a colonial administrator. “I always wanted to try to live a life that would feel like a storybook,” the former Conservative MP muses on a video call from New York.

    Only now, at 49, is Stewart plunging into the zeitgeist, as a hit podcaster. The Rest Is Politics, which he presents with the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, regularly tops the UK podcast charts. He has found an unlikely following among liberal-leaning politics fans who would typically shun anything to do with an ex-Tory cabinet minister, but give Stewart a pass because of his willingness to excoriate Boris Johnson and share juicy titbits of Conservative party gossip.

    “I came into it not really knowing what I was doing,” says Stewart. “And it’s been a surprisingly strange and painless experience. We just sit down for an hour and chat. It’s slightly bizarre that anyone wants to listen to this.” Tieless in an open-necked white shirt, Stewart speaks in full sentences, occasionally grimacing when asked a knotty question. He characterises Campbell and himself as “centrist dads” who talk about politics, albeit centrist dads who complain about being exhausted from all their international travel, pull in guests including the Labour leader Keir Starmer and reminisce about their encounters with world leaders.

    The son of a spy and former colonial official, Stewart was born in Hong Kong, although his family hails from Perth and Kinross and he spent much of his childhood in Kensington (he once jokingly described himself as “lower-upper-middle class”). He was sent to boarding school in Oxford at eight, then attended Eton. “It made me very bad at dealing with women,” he says. “I was in an all-male environment until I was 18. It took me a long time to learn anything about British society. These schools are like islands floating in the sea. They have no connection. You might as well be in a space camp.”
    Rory Stewart walking across Afghanistan in 2002
    ‘An extraordinary privilege’ … walking across Afghanistan in 2002. Photograph: Rick Loomis/LA Times/Getty Images

    He spent five months as a soldier in the Black Watch after finishing school, before studying at Oxford, where he attended a single meeting of the Bullingdon Club, the notorious all-male dining club whose members have included Boris Johnson and David Cameron. “It seemed to be an extreme statement of a very unpleasant vision of a class system that was completely undignified,” he recalls. “I thought it was unpleasant. I thought people should be ashamed of that kind of stuff.”

    After university, he worked for the Foreign Office – or MI6, depending on whom you believe – in the Balkans, before taking an extended leave of absence to travel extensively across the Middle East. He returned to the Foreign Office after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, publishing a memoir of his time there in 2006. Occupational Hazards details Stewart’s growing disillusionment with the war. Initially supportive, he came to realise the folly of the coalition’s activities in the country. At times, the memoir reads like black farce, with Stewart dispensing bundles of cash to corrupt local officials, failing to mediate between warring factions and almost dying in a siege of his compound. “I think the basic problem with Iraq is that people simply didn’t understand what they were doing,” he says now. “They had a fantasy in their minds of a country that didn’t exist.”

    Is it strange to be doing a podcast with one of the architects of the Iraq war? “I interviewed him a couple of years ago, when I was thinking of setting up my own podcast, but I never released it,” Stewart says. “The entire hour was me trying to talk about what it was like on the ground in Iraq, trying to understand what he thought was happening and why he’d signed up for this.” He says he has been encouraging Campbell to read Occupational Hazards.

    Stewart draws a parallel between his concerns about Iraq and the unease a Labour supporter such as Campbell might feel towards him as a former Conservative politician. “There’s the anxieties that I and, I guess, people who agree with me would have about things like the Iraq war,” Stewart says. “And then there is, for him, the other side of it, which is that he’s got many listeners and friends and supporters who think that Tories are evil and will be equally horrified by my voting record.”

    He sees the podcast as a way to reconcile people with opposing points of views in a spirit of robust debate. “I genuinely feel a lot of admiration and respect and fondness for him, and I think and hope that’s reciprocated,” says Stewart. These are noble sentiments in our polarised times, but I wonder whether such magnanimity is possible only when you haven’t suffered devastating loss as a result of either person’s decision-making: no airstrikes on your home; no relatives made destitute by government cuts.

    I also wonder whether Campbell and Stewart aren’t more ideologically aligned than they suggest. They are white, centrist Scottish men who have been booted out of their parties. Stewart lost the Conservative whip in 2019, after voting against the government to block a no-deal Brexit, and subsequently resigned from the party; Campbell was expelled from Labour the same year after admitting he voted Liberal Democrat in the European elections.

    They are also doting family men, frequently mentioning their children on the podcast. Stewart is married to Shoshana, the CEO of a cultural heritage charity, Turquoise Mountain; they have two sons, aged seven and five. He delivered the firstborn, Alexander, on their bathroom floor, without medical assistance. “We were timing contractions and thought it was all fine,” Stewart says. “And suddenly the baby started to come. But I did it. I mean, obviously, my wife did it. She was remarkably calm about the whole thing.” The family lives in Jordan, where Turquoise Mountain has operations.
    Rory Stewart with his podcast co-host, Alastair Campbell
    ‘I feel a lot of admiration and respect and fondness for him’ … with Alastair Campbell, his podcast co-host. Photograph: Men’s Health UK

    The Rest Is Politics recently hosted Starmer. “I was disappointed,” says Stewart. “There’s so much that I admired from a distance about him. I like the idea of him. What disappointed me was that he didn’t seem radical enough. I didn’t get what the big picture was. I got the impression of a likable, thoughtful, moderate guy, but I didn’t feel the radical ambition.” In general, he thinks that politicians, even former politicians, are too guarded to be interesting interviewees.

    Stewart is one of Johnson’s most reliable antagonists, variously describing the soon-to-be ex-PM as “a monster”, “the best liar we’ve ever had” and “evil”. Now that Johnson has been deposed, will Stewart stop kicking him? “I think he is dangerous and there are people out there who want him to come back,” Stewart says. “I think we need to remind people why he left. He should have gone much, much earlier. What he did was deeply, deeply shameful – and dangerous.” He thinks Johnson will attempt to return to frontbench politics. “He’s trying to do an Imran Khan or a Berlusconi. He’s going to be hovering around, hoping for a populist return.”

  4. I’ve been impressed with him and think he’d have made a decent prime minister. Not least because I think he’s a bit awkward socially and may have never fitted in that well with the elites and may have actually screwed them.

  5. Even good MPs are going to get a lot of hate, especially in the era of social media. It’s even worse when you go against the party line so often as Stewart ended up doing by the end of his time as an MP. He was right to leave because he was clearly not the sort of Tory people wanted anymore.

  6. Sometimes it feels like the media keeps asserting that people should give a shit about Rory Stewart, and it is very hard to give a shit about Rory Stewart.

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