Rory Stewart speaks with Charlotte Higgins at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

[Applause] hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Edinburgh International Book Festival my name's Charlotte Higgins I'm a journalist and author and it's a huge pleasure to invite to be with you here for this very special event with Rory Stuart's now full disclosure Rory and I've known each other slightly for quite a long time because we were students together at Bailey old College Oxford the institution that also spawned the brothers Johnson Boris and Joe it's funny how people turn out so differently isn't it but beyond that the the similarities fade very quickly away I've worked at the Guardian for 20 years Rory has had a much more varied time before I even knew him he had served a short Commissioner in the Black Watch during the holidays when we were students together he was cuter in Princes William and Harry after university he joined the Foreign Office and worked in Montenegro and in Indonesia he then left the Foreign Service in order to walk across Iran Afghanistan India Pakistan and Nepal which resulted in his wonderful book the places in between which one the undersea Prize and was hailed as an all-out classic by the New York Times he then served in Iraq for the coalition as deputy coordinator of a government of Iraq out of that experience came another book occupational hazards and after that he worked in Afghanistan running a charity that was reviving traditional crafts in Kabul and he took up a chair in human rights at Harvard in the wake of the expenses scandal David Cameron put out a call to people who haven't served in politics before inviting them to take up candidacies for the Conservative Party Rory answered that call and was returned as MP for Penrith and the border he served in various government roles and differed as justice minister and lastly in the as Secretary of State for international development he was an outsider candidate in the recent Conservative Party leadership election as you know he came of very honorable faith I he did surprisingly well and had the dubious I think very dubious honor of being the candidate who everybody he didn't actually have a vote in that election would have preferred to have seen it's a wonderful opportunity to be with her with Rory it's this this is his first public event since he resigned from the government having said that he couldn't serve under Boris Johnson and so please join me in welcoming for Easter Rory I'm curious to know what you've been up to since the summer I think you said you were going to go walking which is a very Rory Stewart thing to do and how is the dust settled what have you been doing since he resigned well I've been in the States might my wife is American and I've been in Scotland my mother lives in Greece so to give you a glimpse of walking just to take the last two days yesterday I was with my two sons who are that there's a four year old and the two-year-olds not visible but hidden somewhere in the corner there we climbed as what my four year old would call a big mountain near gun turret yesterday and then today I was walking around Glasgow particularly focused on issues around addiction and homelessness and that was very very striking I mean it's just a simple thing we were there I guess for four and a half hours and it was just a question of stopping talking to people in the streets and often talking to people sitting in doorways about their lives and in particular about heroin nearly twice as many heroin users proportionally in Glasgow as almost any other city in the United Kingdom so these walks are both great exercise but also an opportunity to see things that I don't necessarily see as a constituency MP I represent the Lake District in Cumbria and one of the great privileges of having had the ability to stand as a leadership candidate is it suddenly give me I feel permission to travel to other parts of Britain such as Glasgow today and tomorrow Newcastle and then on to Hartlepool on Wednesday and then on to Manchester on Thursday and so on and so forth and you've also written so peacefully about walking in Britain in your last book the marches which which talked about that whole area of the English Scottish border but what is it that can be gained from being on your two feet shoe leather as a politician and as a writer well I think walking is very very different in the developing world compared to what it's like in Britain so when I walk through Afghanistan I'm walking in a landscape where everybody else is walking when I walk through central Afghanistan the roads were closed by snow so for nearly 32 days there were no cars and when I walked into Bamiyan for example I was walking at the same pace as an probably another hundred people walking into the market with me so I'm walking alongside ox and I'm walking alongside donkeys in Britain the landscape is empty there are very very few people out in the fields industrialized agriculture means there are fewer and fewer people are out even on the National Trails you see surprisingly few people so for me and Britain our walking is a bit of a misnomer it's really about standing what I what I do in Britain is I choose a place for example Wigan or poplar in London and I send out a little tweet saying I'm gonna be at a crisp Street Market and popular at 11 o'clock and then I just stand there and see who turns up and then I do very short walks with people but often it'll be a lady saying there are some heroin addicts shooting up in the ladies loo come and look or somebody will say there's been a knife attack in the estate come and look and I'll go on it's sort of 300 yard walk and then I'll just stand again I'm wondering Andy do we have footage of Murray's walk today two seconds before we went on we were trying the sauna needles this set see a lot of this stuff is kit which has given out free in order to try to protect people so yellow packet here a citric acid you can see they're a single-use needle this is for cooking and see what else you got this plastic is probably what the heroin itself came in but just to get a sense of the scale of the thing you can see that there's quite a wide area here where maybe half the Dozen maybe two or three people will be here a lot obviously hasn't been cleaned up for a long time this issue is really striking I've been out Simon community who've been working with homelessness in Glasgow for a long time they will often see the same half a dozen dozen 20 people every day who will be going in and out of accommodation the fundamentalists you know for most people is this question of addiction and in particular treatment services very very large number of people in Scotland addicted the the rates and Glasgow seem to be higher than other parts of the United Kingdom and there isn't enough support for treatment services I think probably only about a third of people are adequately accessing treatment services so that's really my focus this one thank you very much government presided over an astonishing turn years of austere attorneys five years of austerity which has caused the tide of human misery I'm just wondering how you where that statement about falling services and the policies that you voted for well I think there are number of ways of coming at this one of them is there's no doubt that there is a real problem of lack of money so lack of resources so one of the reasons why addiction services are not good as their answer enough people and there's not enough support behind it I think there are second other things that you learned by doing these kind of journeys one of them is the differences between different parts United Kingdom there are twice as many and this dissenting product was surprising spent I mean take a show of hands would you guess that there are twice as many addiction treatment services per head of population in England or in Scotland so who thinks there is more money going into addiction treatment in Scotland hands up right and who thinks more money going to addiction treatment in England okay they're about 50/50 so the answer is that the situation is far better in England than in Scotland so in England nearly twice as many people nearly two-thirds of people who are addicts received treatment in Scotland it's barely a third and at the same time the rates of addiction in Glasgow are nearly twice what they would be in London or Manchester or Birmingham so there is the money problem that Charlotte mentioned there are these national issues but I think that the thing for me which is most important as a politician is trying to get out of the conversations about poverty with a capital P or austerity with the capital a down to actually talking to people in doorways because but actually if I think about what I did this morning in Glasgow the least informative the least satisfying part of the conversation was with the professionals with the people who were actually running Hep C and HIV treatment who when I try to ask questions about working with people kept bringing it back to your government austerity UN reports whe reports and it was very very difficult to reduce it to what does it feel like in a person's home whereas as soon as I actually got into the doorway of Tesco's and Glasgow and talked to a guy who was sitting in the dalhwan Tesco's suddenly I get a much much more textured vision I get a vision of a guy who has seven brothers and sisters he's the only addicts in his family he's been visiting his sister that morning he says that he's no longer on heroin or cocaine but you can see that he looks about 60 and he's actually in his early 30s he's lost almost all his teeth almost certainly because the methadone script which seems to be wiping out his teeth there is a real sense of struggle and of course he will say the promise that he can't get accommodation but then the person standing with me says actually we put him into accommodation a week ago and then he came out two days later so for me as a politician he the challenge smelters yes there are huge problems for our money and funding but I think both does a prisons minister and in what I'm doing in the walks the real key is to try to get off these very very abstract big big stories around absurdity the kappa later what exactly is happening in that doorway in Glasgow what exactly is working or not working and why is it not working there why is it working better somewhere else does this broader view you're taking now that your your your as it were only a constituency MP now you're not in the government and yet you are taking clearly a broad interest in matters of national interest does that mean you are going to have another crack at the the leadership when it will inevitably perhaps definitely thinking about it I mean it's a very very difficult question the answer is that I have to balance two or three things in my mind what one of them is that I believed very strongly in compromise so I believed that the solution to the brexit situation was a soft brexit a sort of pragmatic moderate brexit where we'd leave the political institutions but remain very close to Europe economically I voted for example for a customs union and the reason why I believe this is that I'm very very worried about polarization I'm very worried that if we go either for an OD or brexit or we reverse the referendum and go for remain we're going to end up with 40 years of a country split right the way down the middle but I lost I lost that argument very very strongly and indeed the withdrawal agreement which I was arguing for as a soft brexit has now been rejected again and again and again so I'm now actually in a situation as a politician well I don't really know what I'm supposed to be saying I mean my instinct is to say again go back to Parliament again next week and say we must find a compromise we must go for a soft brexit we must re-energise through withdrawal agreement but I'm now speaking to who 10 people 15 people because Parliament is now divided between a Conservative Party which is now lining up behind Boris for an idea brexit and labor in the Lib Dems that are increasingly pushing for a second referendum and remains so I my vision of politics worked in a day when public opinion was a sort of bell curve where most voters were in the center now public opinion is like a u-shape and for somebody like me who's in the centre it's a pretty lonely place to be because most of the views are now older the two extremes and that that then means that although many people kindly come up to me and say I'm lucky this time you know better luck next time I'm sure that you'll be you know one of my friends just said to me you'll be the next leader but next leader but one whatever the whatever the the statement was um of course as a working politician I know actually how difficult that really would be to do because in a way what I'm about to do which is to go back and vote against the No Deal brexit will mark me in the eyes of many of my colleagues and many party members as a traitor who's been trying to undermine the whole project and that that will probably damage me for five or ten years so the the the the actual question charlotte's us is one that I have to think about very seriously I have to think about you know I'm I'm 46 now and I have to think about the next 25 years might how can I be most useful but actually do for this country and it may be that spending the next 15 20 years of my life trying to be Prime Minister may not be the most useful contribution I can make so many things in that in that answer and I just want to zero in on one of them just now which is when you talked when you said that you would be branded as a traitor and to me that suggests I mean who would have talked in those terms 10 or 15 years ago there is there is something has happened to language to rhetoric and to narrative in this country all matters on which you're somewhat expert being an excellent writer your book the Marches and the sense was about a search for national narrative sort of patching together your father who is a colonial administrators love of empire with your own kind of doubts about the current shape of Britain on the current direction of Britain can you see a way through this increasingly polarized rhetoric and language or are we stuck here how worried are you it's a it's a real it's it's very perplexing it's very very difficult to work out what's happening because of course the answer is that very very large numbers of people in Britain are our thoughtful moderate serious in fact it amost people in my constituency if you catch them on the right subject on the right day are thoughtful moderate and serious if I talk to somebody about their own business or their own family they're immensely realistic and pragmatic so to take an example a few and and somehow what's odd is that politics is now defying all the rules of normal life so you vote for a prime minister who sounds optimistic and promises things that you might actually suspect are probably impossible but it doesn't matter you still vote for him but in the home you wouldn't do that if your partner your wife or your husband said to you we're moving to Mauritius for seven years tomorrow you'd say you're out of your mind what are you talking about any money there now you have a job in Mauritius we're not going yet but somehow in the world of politics the prize goes to the person that can make the most extravagant and improbable promise and nobody actually the word that's been lost in the whole debate is the word how nobody ever wants to say how are you gonna do this how are you gonna get from A to B in fact one of the extraordinary things that I found in the leadership campaign is people could just sort of shrug it off enormous problems they could shrug off they could say that they were gonna get a transition period with a No Deal brexit and I could point out that was impossible it didn't so there's shift on something else I mean why aren't things sticking in this way why have we got to this because it seems to me that Boris Johnson chose particular form of rhetoric is exactly the sort of hot air bubble of empty claims it's the triumph of empty rhetoric I mean Boris Johnson those are lost about ancient rhetoric so he knows exactly what kind of how place I would think about it but anyway and yet he's doing it I mean yeah how do we how do we deal with that why isn't anything sticking why isn't why is reality bouncing off this rhetoric so I don't know I mean I obviously don't know I mean one possibility is that we are buried in information and views and data so that so much so that we can barely keep the attention so people may have noticed that in a BBC debate he said that there was going to be a transition period with the No Deal brexit but within 3-4 days all that is forgotten and we're just sort of back to well we've got to get this done do or die or we've become it's very difficult to land a blow it's very difficult if you were Jeremy Paxman to ask a killer questions six times and actually pin someone down the whole world has become very very slippery and I suspect that must be because we're losing probably we no longer have a kind of belief in objectivity belief in truth belief in authority strong enough for it to matter anymore that we live maybe it's that we seem to live in this sort of strange internet jungle where any number of facts and pieces of information are sort of circulating around we're all experts in our own way every facts and information is questioned so that and so that the real problem for somebody like me is if I'm being boring and saying how are you gonna do that how are you gonna do that how are you gonna do they don't know but how are you gonna get from A to B actually people will just think other sky just an apologist for the status quo he just makes problems all the time we don't want problems we want solutions we want optimism we want cheerfulness so we don't one of these details the skies that are getting in the way with all these nonsensical details know what we're asking for we're asking for leadership and somehow the idea of leadership has become fairytales that you know that the leader is the person who can produce the most sort of absurd and extravagant fairy tale and how broad a problem do you think that is because if you look at you know if you look at Italy if you look at India if you look at Poland if you look at America you know there are leaders apparently using the same playbook would you put Boris Thompson in that same category how scared are you well I mean this is a very difficult question now that the the I'll try to be as straightforward as I can with you while also explaining that he is my party leader and I'm a Conservative MP so and furthermore I also a loss to leadership race to him so I'm also going to sound like a bitter loser if I'm rude about him um but I think the general phenomenon is clearly there I mean quite clearly one of the things that made him very successful is that he was a celebrity just much much more famous than anyone else I mean when we did the polling the the major ledin that he totally out polled the rest of us is that he was the only person anyone had heard of I mean I Got News for you the son she created the prime minister ninth something like 90% of the British population knew who he was whereas barely 30 40 percent knew who Jeremy Hunt was and so that's a huge advantage before you begin so one of the great things that Trump has or that you know a comedian in or Ukraine can have is just celebrity just being more famous I think the second thing is that there is a yearning to get away from technocratic politics people are looking for something more from politics they don't want it just to be a question of details and problems and how do you get from A to B they really really want dreams they want ideas and this is why we all consume endless movies about Churchill we have this sort of great dream of an era where it's possible to make sure Chilean speeches where the stakes are so high I mean everybody I felt this even when I was in the front office when I was getting fed up with my job I remember feeling as the 24 year old I would stick with this job if I was fighting Nazi Germany that would be the reason to be doing this rather than sitting in an embassy in Indonesia not quite clear what on earth Britain thought they were doing or what we were up to so I think in a way they're playing into a nostalgia or a desire for heroism and grandeur which where is actually what really matters to our lives is you know how do you fix the broken windows in the prison how do you make sure the prison officers have got their a handbook to make sure that they do a cell inspection correctly how do you get that guy out of the doorstep in Tesco's into an addiction treatment program which he will fail in the first time fail in the second time fell in the third time but maybe in the fourth time he's going to get clean and his life is gonna get turn around those are actually the important questions in modern politics but nobody really wants to have a conversation with me about how the fourth time round of an addiction treatment program in heroin in Glasgow works what we want to hear is Britain is great so we're gonna be different we're gonna rip it up we're gonna have a no do brexit we're gonna launch into a new world because there is still this sort of craving for sort of heroic vision which has so little to do with the business of government how do you I mean clearly it's fantasy but that narrative it's disturbingly fantastical but how do you craft a new narrative that takes us forward this is what we all want some kind of answer some kind of path into the future how do you craft a narrative out of mending the windows and the prison well you've got to take back the words you've got to explain that words like courage patriotism truth our words that live in the center ground they have no meaning in fairy tales that the courage of a superhero is not courage I mean if you're actually Superman you're not courageous because you have superpowers right you don't live in the real world right real courage is about and this is where Aristotle was right I mean Charlotte is great classical scholar Aristotle points out that courage is the point between the intermediate point between cowardice on the one hand and full hardiness there is no honor there's no virtue and full hardiness there's no virtue in claiming to do what you cannot do there's no virtue in leading your soldiers into enemy machine-gun fire this stuff is not virtuous the virtue is knowing who you are knowing what this time is in history wearing what this place Edinburgh is knowing what Scotland is knowing what Britain is knowing what our real options in the world aren't we need to reclaim those things we need to understand that actually that's true of our own lives too that what makes us heroes in our individual lives is about a real understanding of who we are not an adolescent fantasy of superpower and if I can reclaim that truth that we know in our own lives and Riaan jekt that into politics suffering failure risk all the mess that is our own lives all the divorces in this room all the failures in the room or the bankruptcies in the room all the ways in which each one of us has less than we wanted to be and make the heroism out of that then you have a real politics sadly we both know that Boris Johnson has read the Nicomachean ethics and it didn't just sort of bounced off him unfortunately Rory I want to ask you about the Union it seems like it's incredibly hard to defend the Union right now and clearly the Scottish nationalists are making you know critical whether out of that as as you would and you of all people you book the marches is so kind of brilliant on the historical contingency of national borders and I know you you you you sort of land on the idea of that being an argument for the Union but then a funny way it could be an argument for quite the opposite you know why don't we make a new settlement why don't we kind of cut things another way do you think the Union has a long-term prospect of survival well I I really hope so because for me the United Kingdom represents complexity compromise trade-offs that it's an argument against oversimplification in the end nationalism is reductive it always involves reducing the size of a country it always involves pretending that there is a big simple solution so generally speaking in any nationalism in any country although it's not made explicit implicitly subconsciously the argument is usually that the fundamental problems that you face in your country and those problems are usually just the problems of being a modern state inequality poverty exclusion addiction education health these problems can be solved just by drawing a line on a map if we just have a border if we just cut ourselves off from them then our problems will be solved right and it isn't true right nothing generally is solved by drawing a line in the sand and saying we're gonna become smaller we're gonna get rid of them it's the think that also in relationships it's the same instinct that says I'm better off on my own you know this relationship is too messy if I can just get rid of all this baggage and junk around this other person or my family I won't be better I don't need it I'm better on my own right the instinct has to be the opposite that's why I'm against the No Deal brexit it's the same thing no deal it's the same no deal is the negative no we don't need them we don't want the others better off on our own we don't want to the mess and complexity the mess and complexity is what makes us right it's reaching out it's embracing its being a tumultuous chaotic country that contains Glasgow and London that contains the highlands and Devon that has that tension between Scottish and English and Welsh and all nourish that's actually what makes us without that we become terribly boring terribly reduced as an enterprise I'm sure the audience will have comments to make on that I would only say that sometimes divorce is a very radical and creative and positive act as you may know from your own life Rory I'm talking of Nicola Sturgeon there's something that Nicola always says at the festival she's a great figure here and speaks every year and speaks beautifully and she she often finds time to say that he thinks that political leaders would be better at their jobs if they read more literature and every time he says this I think absolutely they were so right because it's such a wonderful such an optimistic thing to say and it's about listening to other narratives it's about empathy it's about not being that person who only looks at policy papers and and reports and so I guess it and then the other part of me thinks well lots of politicians I don't like a great or you know should be a bit more impartial but there are politicians who read a lot and I'm not convinced that it makes them better politicians you know so you know Jeremy hunts a great fan of Mandelstam and such a Jovi's is great of Enron's and Michael Gove is a great proponent of reading and you know Boris Johnson love's Homer I don't think that I I'm not sure that it makes them better people so I'm not I'm not sure whether I can really go with Nicholas sturgeons kind of wonderful statement about literature and politics but I wonder what you think well I I think it it lies in the nature of the reader I mean any one of us can plow our way through books without it having much impact on us I think being a being a reader is like saying that you're a churchgoer it doesn't tell you much about the state of your soul right you could you can go to church in many different ways you can read a book in many different ways and if it were true that the reading of literature was sufficient to make you a great sold individual then then all our English teachers should be running the country right it might be doing a better job than the present they might they might be or they might not I mean I I love reading but I think there are many of us who read a lot of books without necessarily being as happy or as wise as we would hope as a result of reading those books there are a lot of politicians who claim to love literature who I'm not sure have read quite as many books as they suggest but I do i I know it's also how interesting for me how really truly great writers almost never write about politics or politicians it's almost impossible to think of a write a truly great writer that I really admire that really focuses on a politician because politicians are really not interesting people they they have no souls really they have no private life they are just that this is lovely line from Auden where he says I'm a private face in a public place is better than the public face in a private place and the politician is always the public face in a private place I mean there is no there's nothing there there's nothing if you peel the onion there's nothing there so the only character in literature I think I can think of who sir-sir a relatively sympathetically described politician is a blunt skin in anna karenina who clearly Tolstoy thinks is a bit of a fatuous fool but is but his rather charming administration he's getting rather good at his sort of pseudo ministerial job and filling out chits and dealing with her civil servants but generally I don't think there's anything in politicians that can really attract the the interest or the sympathy of a writer indeed actually the sympathy of the public I think I think the idea that the public is capable of feeding sort of affection or pity towards politicians it's also sort of unimaginable what what the public really wants is for us to work harder be paid less apologize more or be humiliated more live more real lives resign more often but generally to ask of the public or a writer that they should see a politician as a humanist to us too much politics I think is you're talking about novels politics of course is a fantastic subject for drama and the subject of great playwriting you know David hare and James Graham and a TV the crown which always sent us on on the current prime minister and I think but actually if I think that sort of feeds into what you're saying because it's about those dramas are about conflicts they're about people having arguments with each other they're not about into reality and so the best moments in literature into which say Margaret Thatcher comes because she is like a shadow and certain stories and novels isn't she that's a sort of wonderful scene in the line of BC where she she dances with the protagonist but you only get this kind of perfumed glimpse of her and differ in Hilary Mantel's story the assassination of Margaret Thatcher she barely appears you hear her footsteps and yet Philip pontius novel the his first novel the kitchen found them I think she narrates part of it so you do but there I think it sort of has to be maybe you're right there's a sort of ghostly presence of somebody rather than a sense of inferiority yeah the only interior T of a politician I'm really aware of is is Thomas Mann so a lot iam vemma goethe wakes up in the morning go sir is a sort of practicing prime minister as his little state and we were taken into a sort of daydream reverie where he goes all the way between sort of sexual fantasies and concerns about bits of administration and tax and revenue but that's the only real attempt I've seen to try to and and of course Goethe isn't primarily a politician he's the kind of global genius who just happens to be masquerading as a politician it's I make no remark about our interviewee today the I think it's time for us to involve the audience at least um you'll all have five novels that feature politicians beefy dramas great interior AC but while I wait for the yes find a hand and and put a mic in it could I just ask you to make your questions brief and to the point that would be marvelous and please you have the mic thank you you started the error talking about the addiction problems in Glasgow my question for you is reading community so you are an MP not in Scotland and there's an argument that people voted for brexit because they wants to get away from London rule what do you think the rule is the community not just politicians in terms of where we are right now well I think I think communities are a very interesting word because it it draws on a very historical idea of a village where everybody's rooted in the soil everybody's related to each other everybody's been living there for hundreds of years but when we apply it to modern Britain we mean something so different that we should almost be using a different word and that's been true in Britain for probably two hundred years by 1805 50% of the population of central Scotland was not living where they were born in the most romantic late district villages which I go into which give the impression of sort of uh 800 years of oral history it'll turn out that 90% of the people in the village today we're not are not living where they were born and if you go to the Scottish Borders you go to rocks for it for example rocks remains and you read all these books about the border Rivas and you think that you're right up on the edge of the Roman frontier but you look at the people in the village and it will turn out that will be two consultants one aromatherapist two masses a colonel a contractor I mean II and out of that then we have to shape our community we're shaping communities out of situations where we often don't really know our neighbors or we get to know our neighbors extravagantly as young retired people moving to the lake districts throwing ourselves into community life with a verdict honest so we run the local pantomime we work for the parish council but we do that sort of in a burst of energy for 10 or 15 years I mean sort of collapse again right and then then we actually give up because actually our children aren't living there so we move down to Devon we could give up on them give up on the whole project again so this thing community to operates in the modern world will have to be very different and sometimes you know it could even be rather interesting I mean could be digitally enabled I mean is it possible for example if you live in Edinburgh but your mother lives in London you know for me to visit your mother in London and you to visit my mother and Crieff right could we trade off trade off community relationships or contacts right but getting into that getting into the heart of that getting into how much time someone's got where do they live how long are they going to be there these things really really matter because otherwise you're back to my problem with these letters you know these capital letters austerity poverty community what does it really mean here you know wasn't really mean for that guy sitting in that door in Tesco's on his methadone script shooting up with heroine who has six siblings living within half a mile of him and a mother living within a half a mile of him and 15 nephews and nieces who pass him every day but who don't really want to talk to him because their uncle's a heroin addicts I mean what does community mean in that context in the microphones over here please go ahead hi Rory I find it very fascinating about your walks through the Middle East Asia you know it came to be inquires cooler today you know I've seen a video earlier today and you know me coming from Glasgow even that was shocking to me you know but the one thing that crosses my mind is that obviously you know after running for PM you're not exactly a you know a low-level politician you know you mean your cannon becoming my popular faker at politics so do you ever feel a concern for your safety when you're in these walks am I not in Britain not in Britain it's becoming difficult now if I go to somewhere like Afghanistan or Iraq just because the the chance is now of my being recognized and kidnapped are higher than it was 10 12 years ago and that that is purely because of social media it's simply because the Afghan social media got interested in the possibility of my campaign to be Prime Minister and the fact that I speak in Afghan language generally and in Britain I don't feel under threat what I feel though is is something worse as a sort of minor celebrity now if I get on a get on a train London cameras three and a half has 45 separate people came up to talk to me when I flew with my two little kids my wife to Marbella I was talking at the plane loo on jet to Airlines and suddenly realized that everybody else queueing in the loo knew who I was so the conversation I'm having with my wife is suddenly being listened to in a very different way III am I'm not sure about that I think I may have reached a sort of level so I think now I don't know but probably my sense as these areas is that maybe 40 50 percent of people know who I am and of those 10 percent are coming up to introduce themselves that's not pleasant because you suddenly if you're not careful are taking the expectations of too many people too many people come up very very well-meaning people and they say very nicely well done you should be our next Prime Minister stick at it Rory you're the future keep speaking the truth and I say thank you very much but what I actually and they say no problem no bother thank you or they say the classic line is I'd never vote conservative but I'd vote for you very useful right great very useful statement but actually it's a bit dangerous you realize why I mean I get a tiny glimpse of why I didn't think celebrities tend to be very happy because if you're not careful if you take those statements to Serie C you begin to impose expectations on yourself which a ludicrous these are strangers who don't know you from Adam I mean they have no idea about you they've concentrate on you for 10 minutes they've projects it onto you some funny vision that you're some heroic truth teller who's gonna save the country and then you have to go around working out what you do with that and the answer is that generally you have to ignore it [Laughter] Thank You Rory and my question is a bit similar actually to your answer distantly when I listen to you this evening I hear truth and I hear honesty and I wondered can a nice guy get to be Prime Minister you admit failure more than other politicians I mean I think the I think the answer is possibly they can I mean I I had a I had a boss who was the section safe jester David gorg who genuinely is a very very very nice guy I mean he's modest he's thoughtful he's intelligent it's the best boss I've ever had and he was you know he was he was actually safe Justin Lord Chancellor of England now whether he could quite become Prime Minister I'm not sure because in a way what makes him so extraordinary is that he's very modest I'm he's very understated very quiet man so maybe quite difficult to interject I think the bigger risk is that you actually don't remain nice very long politics is a very very damaging corrosive thing after nine ten years in politics your mind your heart your soul is actually eroded in a hundred ways that you can't quite begin to describe and imagine so that it's almost impossible to imagine because unfortunate a mime Minister even if you were nice as he when you began you'd very quickly cease to be because you'd go mad I mean actually being promised a form of madness it's a form of sort of strange vanity I mean ego is at the heart of vanity ego insecurity craving aversion ignorance these things are so deeply bound in with this very poor livelihood of being a politician that I didn't think that you could continue to be good for very long why did you want to do it well I thought that I could change things so I became a politician really because I was very angry about the Iraq war and then about Afghanistan and I felt as a civil servant as a diplomat on the ground arguing against these things that the people that had made the decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan were the politicians and if I could become a politician then when I was at the top I could stop these things so I imagined that you know I would arrive in Parliament and I'd be able to sort of stop craziness of British foreign policy I'd be able to bring sense to the system I'd be able to sort it out because there's a civil servant you blame the politicians a lot and I did I was a civil servant for a decade blaming politicians but of course once you are there you realize how astonishingly weird the situation is I mean one of them gonna bang on about it too much but one of the weirdest things is they never leave you in a job long enough to do anything so I I was the Environment Minister for 11 months huge privilege running all the national parks responsible for the Environment Agency for national sorry 11 months later I made the Middle East station minister I'm just getting to grips with a war in Syria seven months later they make me the Africa Minister I chase around Africa I meet 13 African heads estates I deliver develop these relationships I write the Africa strategy for the British government in a day before my Africa strategies do to be signed off I made the prisons Minister right I then say okay I'm going to turn round violence in prisons if I don't turn around violence in 12 months I'm gonna resign and about 11 months into my job I made the Central State for international development right so it is actually an a system like this almost impossible to do it I mean none of you could I don't think unless you're you spotted something I could it's it isn't sensible to think that you can achieve something in a year you're just laying the foundations you need four or five years really two years to turn it around two years to bed it down a year to maybe CEO success at least so I think our system needs to be blown up from the bottom call for revolution there are so many hands and the microphones over here somewhere hi I wants to ask um I feel like I'm putting in the spot because it's about a government of national unity and you said you don't want people put me as I'm a the door actually and I'm glad I didn't say anything like you should be p.m. or suddenly because that's not a good thing but yet are you willing to meet I think Joe Swensons pretty much said that anybody who leads a government of national unity would have to give up future ambitions to lead the country or their party you the beginning of the conversation you sounded like you'd maybe started to reassess how lately those where would you be willing to lead a government of national unity to stop no deal so I definitely be willing to give up my you know future and the party and the sent me other I think the question for the government national unity is what's it trying to do and this is the problem for me is this that I believe in this very unpopular idea of a compromise of a sort of pragmatic moderate brexit where we leave the political institutions European Union and we remain close to Europe economically diplomatically etc and what is this government national unity doing when it's stopping an OD or exit is it stopping you know do brexit in order to have another go at compromise soft brexit or is it doing it in order to hold a second referendum and push for remain if it's doing it to go for the second referendum push for remain then that's I'm not the person to lead that because I'm very worried about that I'm worried that if you had a second referendum either people vote for a hard No Deal brexit which I hate or they vote for remain and by a small margin and then I'm very worried about what that then means for the next 10 20 years and what so I don't get this government to national unity I'd love to be Prime Minister I'd love to sort out our presence I'd love to really put some time into thinking about how this country works with adult social care and I think that would be just the most wonderful thing to do with your life if we could really work out how to look after the elderly sustainably properly and Britain but it doesn't sound like that's what this government of national unity is doing it sounds like it's a sort of funny parliamentary maneuver so and if that's all it's trying to do if all it's trying to do is hold the second referendum Parliament can vote for that without having a government of national unity thank you political nationalism marched across Europe behind United Kingdom well the only way to stop political nationalism marching across is to really dig into the moral outrage against nationalism in its worst forms I mean in Germany people understand what's wrong with nationalists mean really really understand it even in France even though nationalism is on the rise basically most people in France get it they get what's wrong with it we live in a very strange country where because of our experience in the second world war we never really had to think about what the negative sights and nationalism might be so I was in Cumbria at a dinner party with a French professor and with a seventy-year-old Cumbrian very wealthy Cumbrian man who suddenly started saying this French professor you'll never understand us because you lost at adding core and Crecy and this French professor thinking how do you mind I mean actually calls in 1415 what are you talking about it it's completely insane I mean the idea that a French person would be banging on about a battle in 1415 is it isn't I mean England in 1415 is a completely foreign countries are nothing to do with us they barely spoke in English that we would understand I mean it's just it's ridiculous right but somehow we have continued because we think it's some we think it doesn't matter talking about Bannockburn or William Wallace or crazy or a drink or a Henry the fifth or what we take it quite lightly because we never went through the experience of the Second World War we never sense just how crazy this stuff is it literally has nothing to do with our lives it might my sons are related to you know thirty of the commanders who fought at Bannockburn I can assure you those people if you were to meet them today nothing in common with them you know these people I mean they these people Robert the Bruce John Dube Leo I mean their names the French names I mean John debating when he loses retires to Bailey Olin picady where he comes from money they spoke French they went off on crusade they they're all related to each other on either side are these Robert the Bruce and Edward the first I mean his father never feels great mates I mean that they're they're all there is a tiny aristocratic coterie of weird anglo-norman landowners I mean the idea that these people have anything to do with modern life it's just mad mad mad mad so yeah we have to point to insanity oh yeah so you mentioned that it could have been the media that made Boris Johnson and I know that you are pretty savvy with your smartphone doing your selfie videos which is quite popular do you think a social media could ever make a politician or otherwise do you think there should be restrictions on the media that is making the politicians perhaps biased Lee no I think that's the I think you're right I think that's where it's got to be I think we've got to learn to make the arguments for the center ground through Facebook through Twitter through Instagram we can't cede it to the extremists and I think it can be done I mean I really discovered actually the positive power of this I would give an interview to Daily Telegraph on adult social care and they would ignore it completely and just write about me smoking opium and Iran right and I would then put out a small video which I record in Edinburgh on adult social cab which the Telegraph for thought was too boring to print and 650,000 people would watch it I'd put out something on brexit 2.2 million people will watch a little thing that you put out on Twitter of it I mean there is huge power to actually include people to talk about things that we deeply deeply care about jump over the heads of the media but we can't allow that to be just the domain of Donald Trump we've got to take that back take it back the microphone has a microphone up here yeah you felt like you were quite alone in the centre ground possibly just the case within the Conservative Party it feels quite depressing for those of us who don't by Boris's optimism but to be pro-union and pro europe these days feels quite a lonely place to be so what optimism can we take for the next few years if that's our view well I think it's its it we just have to trust in reality and truth that in the end the arguments were making are richer and more complicated in a good way they're more mature and that in the end sense and maturity will win through so we just have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and accept that the better side of humanity is on the side of complexity inclusion compromise moderation the center ground and that it's the worst side of ourselves that wants to polarize and wants to push to the extremes it could be quite ugly when the fantasy actually hits the buffers of reality that's also though yeah well I mean that's the thing that's right that of course is true of this that the problem is that if I and my colleagues failed to prevent an OD or brexit now or in the future because we might well win in Parliament in September but then just get another extension and then lose again and March I mean people are very determined on brexit and they they're very uninterested in a compromise in the moment when the impacts of that is felt and I believe the impact will be significantly negative I mean there will be real economic consequences this for our car industry for farmers exception very cleverly they won't blame the No Deal brexit for that they'll blame me right somehow it will be the fault of Europe or this sort of evil elites or the parliamentary conspirators who somehow prevented it being the successful brexit that it could have been if only they'd been allowed to do it that's the great trick of populism that it's immune to to real consequences because the narratives you can just keep being refrained I'm gonna take one last question Thank You firstly as a woman it's great to have children in the room thank you for bringing your children here secondly given how isolated you are within your own party two things firstly wouldn't it make sense to switch parties and if you don't want to switch parties and you don't want to be part of government of national unity how about building a coalition based on those values you talked about like compassion courage honesty the Tory Party as it is in government in the cabinet the Tory Party of Britannia Unchained it seems to me to be so entirely different from the the Tory Party of tradition and conservatism of this law say that you it seems to me operate in I think that's a kind of really good question so go ahead yeah well I mean I have to keep coming back to my belief that the things that made me a conservative which are a belief in prudence at home restraints abroad limited government respect for individual rights respect for tradition love of landscape love of history I mean all these things which make me in a sort of a a Tory are there still I mean I I'm not a revolutionary I'm not a rationalist I I'm gonna finish with a quote from from from Yeats because he he says in explaining conservatism against what he called wigger II and Wickery for him is is is the rationalist tradition of politics he says him he's talking about Irishman not Scots but it's a good way of ending he says says of human of Berkeley of goldsmith of Burke he says all hated Wickery that leveling rational rancorous sort of mind that never looked out of the eye of a saint or out of a drunkards eye all's wigger ii now and we old men amassed against the world thank you very much [Applause] thank you ladies and gentlemen I'm going we're going to thank Maury again but I just want to do it this tiny tiny bit for housekeeping which is that Rory is now going to be signing books in the signing tent so you want to leave the tent go left and left again but the most important thing is that you have to wait until we've gone or else you will never get there but could you join me again in thanking Rory for a really terrific fascinating [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: edbookfest

Views: 10,810

Rating: 4.5882354 out of 5

Keywords: Edinburgh, International, Book, Festival, Rory Stewart, Rory, Stewart, Politician, Conservative, Conservatives, Tory, Tory Party, Brexit

Id: TdJ9d5OSbKw

Length: 60min 41sec (3641 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019