Part 1 recalls Stewart’s progress, via the army, to a parliamentary seat. In part 2 he goes into government.
Minister of state
In 2015, after the general election, Prime Minister David Cameron made Rory Stewart Parliamentary Under-secretary in the Department of the Environment (DEFRA).
The secretary of state for the environment was Liz Truss, promoted by David Cameron at an early age because of her “strong media performances”. Stewart looked at a number of these, and concluded that:
“In none of them had she reflected, apologised, explained, empathised, or attempted to persuade. Nor did she ever … answer a question. Instead she approached interviews as broadcasts: opportunities to repeat the party attack line, never giving ground, or varying her tone … and although her speeches were generally confined to the blandest opinion, she delivered these banalities in the tone of someone challenging an entire establishment consensus.”
She liked to be provocative, and because she knew Stewart was a foreign policy specialist, said to him:
“I cannot see why you waste your time with foreign policy. I cannot imagine a job I would like less than to be Foreign Secretary. I think the Foreign Office is a waste of time.”
“We’re going to begin by cutting the Department. I want you to cut 25% in your part of the Department.”
Stewart felt that her genius lay in exaggerated simplicity. Governing might be about critical thinking, but the new style of politics, of which she was a leading exponent, was not. He wrote:
“If critical thinking required humility, this politics demanded absolute confidence: in place of reality, it offered untethered hope; instead of accuracy, vagueness. While critical thinking required scepticism, open-mindedness and an instinct for complexity, the new politics demanded loyalty, partisanship and slogans: not truth and reason but power and manipulation.”
Stewart’s departmental portfolio consisted, in part, of flooding, air quality, national parks, wildlife and nature, recycling, environmental subsidies, public forest estate, chemical spills, national litter strategy, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and water supply. He tried to make progress on various issues, air quality and flooding, but got nowhere because of opposition from within his own department, other departments, or No 10. He wrote:
“The plastic bag tax had been blocked for seven years, apparently because the Daily Mail and a single adviser in No.10 thought it unconservative.”
Stewart took the legislation for a 5p per bag tax through parliament with no opposition, and it reduced the number of bags by over a billion and raised money for charities. The Daily Mail headline was “Plastic Bag Chaos”.
Stewart tried the same with takeaway cups, but was stopped by Truss, who issued a formal statement that she was overruling the initiative. “Stop being interesting, Rory”, she said.
After the Brexit referendum
During the referendum campaign, Stewart was forbidden to speak publicly on behalf of the Remain side. The designated Remain spokesmen made the case for Remain mainly in terms of the economic catastrophe which would ensue from Brexit.
After the referendum, Cameron resigned and was replaced by Theresa May.
In forming her cabinet, Prime Minister May included many prominent Brexiters. She offered Stewart the role of minister of state in the Department of International Development (DfID). Stewart had been in DEFRA for just 12 months. He offered to hand over his DEFRA portfolio personally to his successor there, Therese Coffey, but she declined to meet him.
Stewart’s new secretary of state at DfID was Priti Patel, who had previously called for that department to be abolished and for the aid budget to be slashed. Now she said that accountability and value-for-money were non-negotiable.
Stewart was an ambitious public servant who wanted to improve things but, just as at DEFRA, he found obstacles at every turn, and had to resort to being devious to get anything through at all.
Foreign Office
After the 2017 election, May made Boris Johnson foreign secretary (Johnson had returned to parliament in the 2015 election, despite promising not to do so while still Mayor of London). At the same time she agreed with Stewart’s suggestion that he could move to the Foreign Office as a minister, and combine the Middle East and Asia portfolios of both the DfID and FCO Departments.
When he met Johnson in the Foreign Office, he was told that he was to do Africa – “You’ll love it Rory, a Balliol man in Africa”. When Stewart explained that he knew nothing about Africa, and that would nullify the reason for his move, he was over-ridden.
Later, at a party event, Stewart was approached by an aide to Evgeny Lebedev, who invited him to a weekend at his castle in Italy, where a celebrity who had made her name modelling topless in The Sun would be present. Stewart declined, on the basis that Lebedev’s father was in the KGB. He was told not to worry about that, “Boris Johnson is going and he is Foreign Secretary”.
In his first few months, Stewart travelled to many African countries, and was astonished by the speed and depth of the erosion of the Foreign Office’s position in Africa. When he had first joined the Foreign Office in 1995, there were 26 UK-based British diplomats in Zambia. By the time he returned to Zambia in 2017, only two remained, an ambassador and a secretary. Germany had over a hundred personnel in Zambia in their development agency alone.
Stewart had been briefed that UK work in Malawi had allowed hundreds of thousands more girls to be educated at a cost of less than $85 per student per year. He discovered, on a visit, that:
“After seven years in school, almost 80 percent of those Malawi girls were unable to read or write, half the students had no classrooms, there were no textbooks, not even chalk for the blackboards. The average class size across the country was one teacher to 130 children. And yet DfID continued to boast about the programme because it met a manifesto commitment to educate 100 million girls.”
In Nigeria, Stewart was taken to a clinic which had an entry arch saying that it was the gift of the British people. Inside there was human excrement on the floor, an electric fan but no electricity within ten miles, no sheets on the beds, no medicines on the shelves, and no patients mad enough to enter the clinic. He was astonished that officials had driven him so far to view such a project.
At the Monday meetings with the Foreign Secretary, Johnson would say, “Right, I want this year to be a year of achievements, these are my priorities”, and he would look at some cards in his hand (probably taken from the Economist that morning):
“We will sort out the relationship between India and Pakistan, let’s sort out the relationship between Saudi and Iran, and we should sort out Libya, Rory – the pluckiness of global Britain, we’re Periclean statesmen after all.”
When Stewart explained that Libya was another minister’s brief, and anyway the UK didn’t have an embassy in Libya, and we would do better working with Italy and the UN, Johnson replied “Come on Rory, you can do it. Libya!”
His last two initiatives at the Foreign Office were to write a national security strategy for Africa, and to persuade the new president of Zimbabwe, Mnangagwa, to hold and conduct fair elections, in return for international financing. Despite full support from the Foreign Secretary (“Splendid, go for it Rory!”), neither achieved any success.
And so to prison …
In the dying days of May’s premiership, Stewart was re-shuffled again, as minister of state in the Department of Justice, under David Gauke, where he took on the role of prisons minister.
At his first departmental meeting there, he discussed ministerial appointments with a colleague:
“Fluent Chinese speakers, decorated colonels, physicians, lawyers, and successful businesspeople, qualified for Cabinet, had been left permanently on the back benches by both Cameron and May. When the colleague, a doctor, had finally been made a minister, it was in the Ministry of Justice, whereas a lawyer had been appointed in his place to the Department of Health.”.
Stewart’s experiences in his new role were just as frustrating as in his three previous ministerial roles. His one area of success was when he prioritised improving conditions at ten badly performing prisons, by concentrating on basics like: keeping the prisons litter free, inspecting cells regularly and properly and fixing any problems, setting up a special task force, training prison officers better, learning from other better-performing prisons, and enforcing a carrot and stick approach to gaining and losing privileges. He publicly threatened to resign if improvements did not occur within 12 months. They did, and he carried on.
Continued in Part Three
Politics On the Edge – A Memoir From Within, by Rory Stewart. Penguin 2023. Details here.
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