This memoir begins with an author’s note, subtitled facts, narration, prejudices, and in it Stewart declares that “our government and parliament are now in a shameful state”. In part this is because all other insiders apart from himself choose “to conceal its horrifying decline”. Many of his ex parliamentary colleagues are not going to like what he reveals about them, Rory warns us, but given that they’re mostly self-interested, smug, venal, careerist bastards what other choice does he realistically have? The public has a right to know. “There will be mistakes in this account,” he nobly confesses, and “I have tried to be honest about my own vanity, ambitions and failures”. However when push comes to shove British democracy has become such a dreadful shit show I have no other choice than to evacuate my utter disgust and shame.

So in beginning this review let me also confess to a few facts and prejudices of my own. I enumerate them as follows:

The liberal left in general have decided Stewart is that rare thing, a decent socially caring intelligent Tory – ostracised and eventually driven out of the party by thuggishly devious right wing ideologues. I don’t buy into that simplitude and suspect it to be substantially a self-generated myth.
I have a wealthy friend who used to be one of the Tory party’s treasurers. (Apparently the Tories are so slippery when it comes to finance they don’t trust just one colleague to do the job but many.) He supported Stewart in the leadership election and after he lost out my friend created a fighting fund for Stewart in order to keep him politically viable the next time a leadership election came along. About £1.5 million was raised and given to the beneficiary. My friend told Stweart to put the money in a separate bank account for obvious ethical reasons of transparency. Stewart delayed in doing this. His star was in the ascendant as the True Moral Conscience of Toryism and messianic pariah. He was becoming conceited, believing his own publicity material, strutting around the periphery of politics and feeling increasingly he was only accountable to himself. When my friend was invited by Stewart to a private reception designed by Stewart himself to consolidate his growing power base, the principal player failed to show up on time. Periodically messages were relayed to the impatient gathering about Rory’s whereabouts and the champagne liberally poured out to alleviate the disquiet. But after 90 minutes my friend had experienced enough and walked out in disgust. As for the £1.5 million, it was never deposited and its spending has never been accounted for.
Blue on Blue infighting can be a very lucrative genre of publishing. Alan Clarke’s diaries made a pile of money for author and publisher alike and most recently we have Michael Gove’s ex wife stirring the shit pot with her lurid memoir How Not To Be A Politician’s Wife. Why should anyone be surprised that Stewart wants to join the gravy train? The book buying public is both prurient and ingenuous. It loves establishment insiders who dish the dirt. The soap opera of UK politics serves them admirably. As a source of entertainment it ranks second only to the Royal Family. A book like this tells you more about the indefatigable cynicism and opportunism of capitalism than it does about anything else on the author’s alleged agenda.
The cover photograph on the book shows a skinny, baby-faced man walking across a precipitous gulf with long legs that look grotesquely out of proportion to his body. His tail coats flutter in the wind, his facial expression a study in purposeful solemnity. Here then is our hero, vulnerable, morally serious, striding ever onwards and defying topographical reality. A beautifully clever image but entirely phoney and designed to entice you into a quasi fictional world where the little man struggles intrepidly against skullduggery, decadence and self-interest……..

So Rory kicks off his memoir in 2003, a chapter surprisingly entitled with Wordsworthian panache Suddenly Coming Alive. He is actually thirty by that stage and feels no need to inform us that, born in British ruled Hong Kong to a big wig colonial service father, he enjoyed a privately educated childhood that included Eton before moving on to Balliol College, Oxford. ‘Born with a silver spoon in his mouth’ is the phrase that springs to my mind, if not to our newly regenerated author’s. A bit later Rory mentions that as a teenager he avidly supported the Labour Party. Why therefore he decided to join the Tories, once the glamour of life in the diplomatic service had worn off, is not clear. It’s a significant omission to me because Rory is up for judgement every bit as much as the Tory Toffs he has subsequently come to loathe. Surely nobody can swim in a cesspit without becoming tarnished by the ordure? It strikes me, therefore, that INELUCTABLY STAINED BROWN would have worked better as a title for this autobiography.

Rory loves walking. That quickly becomes established. And not just a preprandial stroll to the newsagent. After a some diplomatic stints in Indonesia and Montenegro he took a couple of years vacation to walk across Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan and Nepal. And he got a best selling book out of the experience! I think it’s called Sore Feet, Blisters And The Places In Between. He recuperated by becoming the governor of a couple of regions in occupied Iraq before moving to Kabul in 2005 to run a charitable foundation.A spell at Harvard followed during which he started nepotistically sniffing around Conservative establishment backsides to further a hitherto dormant ambition to become an MP. He modestly describes his accession to the candidature of the vacant Penrith seat as lucky. It was 150 miles south of his family home in Scotland so he decided to walk down there, presumably because a public transport strike was on at the time. And the rest is history. At the 2010 general election the “toe curlingly” embarrassed and humble “Rory The Tory” won with a record majority!

At some stage in his parliamentary career, which lasted nine years, that humility obviously wore off – but not just yet. Indeed Rory quickly discovered he was regarded as a nerdish parvenu and posh upstart crow by his colleagues. His debut speech about academy schools bored everyone stiff, nobody wanted to sit next to him in the chamber (presumably because he smelled strongly of virtue), the whip told him to bugger off because he couldn’t tell the difference between amendments 56 and 58 and worst of all, given that the government was trying to resolve the resurgence of the Taliban crisis, nobody gave a twopenny fuck for his vast expertise on life in Abyssinia, least of all Philip Hammond the brand new Defence Secretary. Those rebuffs alone should have sent Rory The Tory running for the Cairngorms but ambition is made of strong stuff as we shall see. Our man hurls himself into constituency work with some success until he stupidly makes a semantic gaff to a reporter that hits the tabloid headlines in a much distorted way thereby loading a sense of disgrace on his head and giving his MP colleagues another reason to laugh at him. David Cameron isn’t laughing though when Rory rebels against his bill to make the Lords an all elected body. But neither is our hero. Osborne punishes him by promising no ministerial post within the current parliament. On the plus side Rory gets elected to the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and his wife has a baby. Clearly he’s doing something right.

When Cameron calls the election in 2015 he ferries in an ex Obama chief of staff to plot the strategy, using social media analysis and algorithms based on consumer shopping choices. We all know the result and what happened subsequently – Lib Dems decimated, Brexit, Cameron gone, Corbyn in, May, Boris – one political nightmare dissolving into another. But how did Rory read it? What was he doing while democracy burned? I bet he went on a few long walks and did a lot of hand ringing with Ken Clark at The One Nation Tory luncheons. Anyway Rory is given a job as a junior minister in DEFRA and assumes egotistically that it’s because Cameron prefers him inside the tent pissing out rather than outside pissing in. How grand! How presumptuous! So far as I can tell Rory is as prolific at political pissing as Eddie the Eagle was at ski jumping.

If Rory was angered by Cameron’s simplistic managerial philosophy – “One’s colleagues are either team players or wankers” – then his new DEFRA boss, Liz Truss, scandalises him with her brazen over-confidence. “Everything she did had the flavour of provocation,” he notes on his first day as she orders him to produce a ten point plan for the national parks by Friday. She chastises him that his problem is trying too hard “to be interesting”. Nonetheless he gets his 5p tax on plastic bags through parliament unopposed. Rory’s frustration mounts as every interesting proposal he makes the government cannot afford. He appears to have forgotten this is the decade of austerity.

It is all a bit like Pilgrim’s Progress, or rather lack of progress, as our trusty public servant gets shuffled from one government department to another only to find unexpected and hugely insurmountable problems stymying his every well-intentioned move. Overseas aid with its enormous budget yet incompetent or corrupt recipients of money; then Prisons with virtually zilch resources, overcrowded institutions, demoralised staff and uncooperative or suicidal inmates. The real change agents are not the ministers but the senior civil servants who know their boss is amateurishly out of his depth and merely passing through on his journey up or down the greasy pole. Ministerial opinions and strategies don’t matter. Smile and nod obsequiously then do your best to subvert them when his eye is off the ball. Rory is banging his head against a brick political wall and seems surprised and not a little annoyed. But surely he could have found all this out by just sitting down and watching six episodes of Yes Minister, that brilliant TV spoof on government ineptitude?

The Brexit deadlock hardens, Theresa May calls an unnecessary election and loses her overall majority, the Boris juggernaut is gathering momentum and Rory becomes minister of state for the environment. He’s joined the cabinet of a dead woman still just about walking. The vultures are circling. Who will replace the Maybot and save the country from a fate worse than Boris and his ERG confederates? Rory becomes obsessed with this problem. The senior remainers are all running scared apparently. Rory begs his hero, David Gourke, to stand for the leadership but he refrains. Everybody on the One Nation moderate side of the Tory party is running scared and has now accepted that the extreme right wing shit must hit the fan and nobody can stop it. The nation is doomed to have a deceitful, lecherous, cynical, incompetent, narcissistic populist opportunist as its prime minister – end of. But cometh the hour, cometh the would be hero! Early on Rory had admitted to having had fantasies of becoming a hero as a kid, – presumably when other kids of the same age were having wet dreams – and his attempt to become party leader ends just as dismissally in the second TV studio hustings debate. I remember watching it. I agreed with his MP colleague who subsequently said, “Rory completely bombed it. What we were left with after that debate was a bit of roadkill that was still twitching but in need of being put out of its misery.”

Boris as the new prime minister effected this mercy killing very quickly, chucking him out of the party for continuing to vote against a no deal Brexit. The story of Rory’s decline and fall is wrapped up rather too quickly for my liking in the remaining two pages. He flirts with the idea of standing for London mayor as an independent but drops out due to Covid delays and lack of money. A return to the Labour party seems not to interest him. Too many uncouth lefty louts around the place presumably? However he has a large familial home in Scotland to return to, two young kids to father, rural walks to enjoy, a beckoning career as a broadcaster. Should we feel as sorry for him as he seems to feel for himself? Personally I don’t. I’m reminded of that song, I Fought The Law But the Law Won – in Rory’s case the law of the Tory political jungle. I feel far far sorrier for Corbyn and McDonald whose unfair debasement gets no mention here. This omission astonishes me. Both he and Corbyn tried and failed to save their parliamentary parties from the worst excesses of their respective demonic Id tribal natures. Surely Stewart should be making comparisons? There are many other issues I have with him. His definition of One Nation Toryism is risibly simplistic. Does he not understand how rigidly inequalities exist in the UK, how they are inextricably linked to the capitalist system he champions? How for instance the CEO’s of the FTSE top hundred companies earn the annual salary equivalent of their average employee in just THREE DAYS?!?

I find it a strangely self-obsessed narrow book, a bit too clunkily earnest, that slides over too many crucial issues to do with social class, privilege, tradition and the structures of democracy. The post narrative glossary pages suggest to me it is intended to be a primer for the politically illiterate. Given that Rory has gone on to make radio programmes about the importance of studying ignorance (his own ought to be near the top of the list) and the evolution of heroism I was taken by his reference to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi incorporates three basic Buddhist ideas – nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. Rory is saying, I think, after a decade in the jungle he has finally learnt to appreciate the simplest, most natural elements of life. And this too he shares with Corbyn who apparently likes nothing more than a long stint in his garden allotment.