Politics On the Edge: The instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller from the host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics

Product Information

Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels very distant and theoretical. In Kabul, we delivered the first water supply, the first sanitation, the first electricity for people who had never had these things before. Every week, we seemed to be erecting a new building. It was fast. I was on the ground, shaping, managing. Not signing paper in an office. I was confident that I was changing lives.’ I’ve never usually been a fan of slogging through political memoirs, particularly those from Tories that only held a seat for less than a decade, but after being a longtime listener of his podcast with Labour’s Alistair Campbell I was tempted to give this a go, and I’m glad I did. A searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament from Rory Stewart, former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of breakout hit podcast The Rest Is Politics

Overall, this is worth reading given how different it is to most memoirs, but it is unfortunately, and understandably, less interesting than those whose political careers went a bit further. But you are changing far more lives now – one stroke of a pen on plastic bags has changed the behaviour of millions.’ Not everyone would put him in that category, of course, especially if they happen to be one of the Tory politicians skewered by Stewart in this memoir. Admittedly, one or two of his erstwhile colleagues (David Gauke, now one of the country’s most astute political columnists, being the standout example) emerge from this tale with their reputations intact – or indeed enhanced. But they are the exceptions. I’m not usually one who enjoys spending their time reading political memoirs (for the same reasons that I’m not usually one who enjoys spending their time in the company of wankers). However, I’ve made an exception — just this once — for my ramble-loving boi Rory: The oddball messiah of the centrist tribe (as he was supremely described by The Times in its review of this book). How do you feel, about the other parts of the job,’ John persisted, ‘now that you have real power? It’s a drug, isn’t it, power? I bet you’re glad now you didn’t give up on being an MP.’Politics On the Edge invites us into the mind of one of the most interesting actors on the British political stage. Uncompromising, candid and darkly humorous, this is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life; a new classic of political memoir and a remarkable portrait of our age. It also leaves you shaking your head with incredulity & wonderment on the subject of how Mr. Stewart survived the whole hellish process of political life and has come out the other end of the beast in one piece, while remaining a relatively sane, unembittered and balanced individual. One finds further amazement in the man’s stubbornness, tenacity and resiliency. It was now with three defeats for her Brexit deal behind her, and a crumbling administration, that May promoted Stewart to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development. DAVID CAMERON, Boris Johnson, and Rory Stewart were all educated at Eton and Oxford. Two became Prime Ministers; one did not. Already an acclaimed author, Stewart (Features, 3 November) — with ruthless honesty, not least about himself — describes his nine years in Parliament, concluding with the débâcle of the second television debate that led to his elimination from the chance to challenge Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party. It is both a riveting and painful read, which, frankly, exposes the glaring inadequacies of the dysfunctional way in which Britain is governed. From the former Conservative Cabinet minister and co-presenter of 2022’s breakout hit podcast The Rest is Politics, a searing insider’s account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament

From the former Conservative Cabinet minister and co-presenter of 2022's breakout hit podcast The Rest is Politics , a searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament It doesn’t help that so few people at the top, or indeed anywhere else in politics, seem to have a clue what they’re doing. Time and again, ministers find themselves abruptly appointed to jobs for which they have little if any relevant experience, aptitude or even enthusiasm. Barely have they begun to get to grips with the role than they’re just as abruptly shunted off to another. Stewart deplores “how grotesquely unqualified so many of us were for the offices we were given”, and “a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation”. By the time he launches his bid for No10, he sounds so miserably disillusioned it’s a wonder he found the energy to sign his nomination papers. These days Stewart leads a non-profit organisation that gives cash handouts to the poor of East Africa, and, with Alastair Campbell, co-hosts every centrist dad’s favourite podcast, The Rest is Politics. He has also, however, found time to write this memoir, Politics on the Edge: the story of his 10 years as a Tory MP. It’s very good. Even so, I’m not sure I should recommend it. This is because it casts such a depressing light on Westminster that it may put the reader off voting ever again. From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada:But his voice has not been silenced. With Alastair Campbell, he has created the popular podcast The Rest is Politics. Yet, as this memoir shows, his straightforward honesty, accompanied by his ability to think outside the box in all four of the ministries in which he served, indicates his huge loss to Parliament. He was originally a youthful Labour supporter. Perhaps a Starmer government could provide the answer? Yet Stewart emerges from the carnage a stronger character. He realises that up against the aggressive exaggeration of the European Research Group, his allies on the Tory benches are “like a book club going to a Millwall game”. It doesn’t make him any less intense and he still takes himself far too seriously, but the prisons job and defending what he (and I) saw as a reasonable solution to a 52-48 referendum result ends his “queasiness about confrontational politics”. May goes. Stewart’s wife thinks he should stand for leader.

In fact, much of The Abuse of Power is a similar exercise in self-styling as duty-bound, honest, fair, conscientious and co-operative. It is hard to leave the book without believing that at least some of this is a fair portrayal (though no one will leave the book with the impression that she is a wordsmith). Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. R ory Stewart’s CV would put most of us to shame. Still only fifty, he’s been a tutor to princes, a serving soldier, a British diplomat (and, some say, an intelligence officer), an acclaimed travel writer, deputy governor of an Iraqi province, a charity founder, a Harvard professor, a Member of Parliament, a cabinet minister and a Tory leadership contender. But it’s only in the last year or two, primarily in his role as co-presenter of one of the country’s most popular podcasts, The Rest is Politics, that he’s become something of a national treasure. Yet, in 2009, Rory found himself considering an unlikely move. David Cameron had reopened the Conservative candidates’ list to ‘anybody who wants to apply’. He decided to stand.

Church Times/RSCM:

Penance completed, Stewart embarked on a ministerial career that provides the main course in this feast of political insight. Rarely before has the life of a government minister been described in such granular detail or with such literary flair. It is hard to disagree with any of Stewart’s conclusions, about the dire state of our politics, and the strange and empty character of its representatives. I was left wondering if he would have had a less bruising time as a Labour MP. In 2019 Johnson purged leading remainers and Stewart quit both the Tories and his seat. Last year he reinvented himself as one half of a hugely successful current affairs podcast, The Rest Is Politics, co-hosted with Alastair Campbell. From beginning to end the reader is astonished that the author lasted as long as he did in a career field that seems not only not to value the qualities of honesty, integrity, truthfulness, any kind of loyalty or work ethic but essentially finds these qualities abhorrent to its mechanical day to day functioning. This is personified by Stewart’s recollection of the Conservative Party leadership race towards the end of the book. At times, the reader is left feeling frustrated and helpless to the remarkable events that unravel, much as Stewart appeared to have felt at the time. This feeling perfectly captures the sentiment of many members of the British electorate, from both sides of the political spectrum, whose interest in politics has declined in a linear manner to the increase in populistic tendencies in British politics.

The book is in all fact an entertaining, insightful, timely, refreshingly honest romp through the British political swamp, offering up a tantalisingly clear view of the author’s unnerving time as a British MP. It was too late. With May’s subsequent resignation, the way was open for Johnson to succeed her. Desperate to stop him, Stewart sought a One Nation Tory who might defeat him. Failing, he stood himself. After the first television debate, he became, for many, the favourite to battle it out with Johnson, only to have his chances blown away in that fateful second. Later, for opposing Johnson’s Brexit deal, he, with others, was expelled from the Conservative Party, and left Parliament. All of which makes for a superbly readable book. After his unexpected 2015 election victory, Cameron made Stewart a junior environment minister, serving under Liz Truss. Truss prized “exaggerated simplicity” above “critical thinking”, “power and manipulation” over “truth and reason”. Stewart observes that this “new politics” offered “untethered hope” and “vagueness” instead of accuracy. Truss was allergic to “caution and detail”, he adds. Nobody expected a move into politics. Certainly not Conservative politics. Least of all Rory Stewart.Loved the parts when Rory realises the reality of power in modern state and politics and an absolute highlight is this part when he is the most junior minister at the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) : It’s hard to talk about a book like this without talking too tiresomely about your own politics (which must inevitably come under scrutiny if you’re to write a full review), so I’ll instead simply say that I think Rory has given us a very good book: Politics on the Edge is sharply and poetically written. In fact, it is sometimes a smidge overwritten. But, despite this quibble, I nonetheless found myself drawing a stylistic comparison between Rory and George Orwell. Orwell was also an Old-Etonian-Old-Oxonian child of colonialism who went on to have a colourful self-examined life preoccupied with thoughts weighed down in the mires of worldly geopolitical philosophies. This (admittedly grandiloquent) comparison probably only occurred to me because I’ve lately been on something of an Orwell binge and, yes, linking Rory to one of the 20th-century’s Great Writers is undoubtedly an overreach; regardless, I found Politics on the Edge achieves some of the same suspenseful intensity of Homage to Catalonia as well as the searing anti-establishmentarian ire of The Road to Wigan Pier — odd, given that it was written by a centre-right conservative rather than Orwell’s democratic socialist hand. Uncompromising, candid and darkly humorous, Politics On the Edge is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life and a remarkable portrait of our age. Long passages in this chapter advocate for all the merits of the agreement – its sensitivity to Ireland, its best-of-both-worlds problem-solving. I find it convincing now as I found it convincing then. But her abject failure to interrogate, deeply, why Remainers and Leavers alike didn’t see promise in her arrangement is telling. She thinks they crashed her deal just “because they could” without considering that anyone might have good reason to.