The crackpot worshippers of romantic Rory Stewart
I want to convince you, Rory Stewart said, I can do this. The then Tory MP was in the middle of his run for the Tory leadership in June 2019. I’ve asked around and you are, he said, a reasonably serious person. This half compliment made me laugh out loud, but not him. It was such a Stewart thing to say. I want to persuade you, he said, that I should be Prime Minister.
We met for an interview in his Commons office, and he was interesting on Brexit. We disagreed, politely. I’ve enjoyed interviewing him since and have watched with fascination as his fame grows. Stewart is out of parliament and now has the most successful podcast in Britain. With co-host Alastair Campbell he sold out his event at the Royal Albert Hall in nine minutes. This is no small achievement. Politics generally is conducted at meetings where very few people turn up, but Stewart has made it, or himself, box office.
Now there is a new book – Politics on the Edge: A Memoir From Within – that will be a best-seller. While some of the early reviews are gushing, Janice Turner in the Times, in her interview last week, was far more sceptical. She nailed the weirdness of the phenomenon and the way Rory superfans worship him. There is a contradiction between his claim to be interested in listening and the way in which he never seems to ask any questions, especially of women.
The fans urge Stewart to return as Prime Minister, to “save us”, illustrating again that so much of modern culture and politics in the West can be understood best as a replacement for religion and abandoned Christian rituals.
The rise of the Rory movement is a manifestation of what has happened to some ultra-Remainers since Brexit. Almost a decade ago they were the empirical ultra-rationalists, nice people focused, as they saw it, on facts. Then, something they had never expected happened to people not used to losing. They lost. What followed the 2016 referendum has been maddening for them, although I don’t think many Brexiteers have enjoyed how the years since played out either.
To the horror and astonishment of ultra-Remainers, the holdouts, it got even worse. Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Stewart is particularly perceptive in his analysis of Johnson’s character flaws, although I’ve always wondered to what extent that is explained by jealousy that another showman took it all the way to Number 10. They are both romantics, though Johnson is, or was when he needed to be, much more cynical.
After ten years of the Brexit wars, Rory the Tory is hailed as a messiah by those who were once ultra-rationalist. Now they are followers of an impossible romantic, a mystic, someone who sees himself as a figure destined for glory, an heir to T.E. Lawrence, an adventurer who can converse with tribesmen, a soldier, a great man of history. Perhaps their support for the European Union was, underneath all that rationalism, really just a romantic impulse all along.
The cult of Stewart (read the comments when they defend him) has become so crackpot in its intensity that his followers advocate something wildly fantastical, in denial of constitutional practice and reality.
Rory Stewart cannot “return as PM”. The British system is, in UK terms at least and not in Scotland, based around the two main parties. This is what Johnson understood when he set out to conquer the Tory party and its activists. You need to take over one of the two main parties to become PM. It is the only way.
The Conservative and Labour parties are extraordinarily resilient, and will remain so as long as the voting system continues to be first past the post. Labour, which is about to benefit from the effects of the system, which exaggerates swings, has no interest in replacing it if it wins. A Labour Prime Minister doesn’t want to spend his or her time in office bartering with the Liberals or the representatives of the deluded Green party under proportional representation.
Stewart made his tilt at taking over the Tory party and failed. He was defeated by Boris Johnson, who in effect had better instincts for raw politics.
Any parallel with Churchill, and the possibility of Rory making a May 1940-style return which is mentioned by Stewart fans, is preposterous. The Tories aren’t going to select Stewart again for a parliamentary seat, never mind for leader.
Stewart could, I suppose, have a go at taking over the third party Liberal Democrats and hope his reign coincides with the moment every three or four decades they hold the balance of power at Westminster in a hung parliament, and then barter a change to the voting system, after which he is carried by acclaim to the seat of power.
Once a traditionalist on the constitution, he has shifted to the Lib Dem position on the electoral system. He now advocates proportional representation so small new parties, say one led by R Stewart, can break through. But new parties are very difficult to make a success and imagine leading the Liberal Democrats for a decade instead. What a horrible existence, especially when compared to doing what he’s doing now, being worshipped at the Royal Albert Hall.
“I’d love to do what I can to help Britain,” Stewart grandly told radio host James O’Brien, high priest of the embittered ultra-Remainer movement. It’s a typical Rory soundbite and I suspect Stewart knows his history well enough to know he had his chance and is not going to be given another one.
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