How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S18, Ep3 Rory Stewart on why politics is broken - and what to do about it

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Rory Stewart is a bestselling writer, podcaster, former politician, adventurer and charity boss. You might know him from his chart-topping podcast, The Rest is Politics, which features Stewart and Alastair Campbell disagreeing agreeably about issues of the day. After Eton and Oxford, Stewart briefly joined the army and then the diplomatic service. In his 30s, he was elected as an MP, rising to become the Secretary of State for International Development. He stood - unsuccessfully - against Boris Johnson for leadership of the Conservative Party (a failure which haunts him still and which he discusses in this episode). Now, having resigned from politics entirely, he has published a book, Politics on the Edge, about his decade in parliament. He joins me to talk about the failure of the political system, his own failure to solve it and I explain the rules of 'Shag, Marry, Kill' - never let it be said that I can't lower the tone, eh? -- Rory's new book, Politics on the Edge, is out now and available to order here. -- I'm going on tour! To AUSTRALIA, mate! You can now purchase tickets to see me live at Sydney Opera House on 26th February 2024 or the Arts Centre Melbourne on 28th February 2024. -- How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail] -- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday How To Fail @howtofailpod Rory Stewart @rorystewartuk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. I am so excited and not a little astonished to announce that I am coming to Australia. I will be live in the Sydney Opera House on the 26th of February 2024. That's never a sentence I thought I would say. I am so, so lucky and so grateful. I know that Taylor Swift is playing that night, but if you have failed, see what I did there, to get tickets to see Tay-Tay, come and see me at the Sydney Opera House, 26th of February 2024. And then on the 28th of February, 2024, I will be at the Art Centre

Melbourne at 8pm. I am so grateful to all of my lovely Australian listeners. You have been with me from the start of this crazy endeavour. And I am really, really giddy with anticipation at the thought of meeting you all. I can promise you an evening full of laughter, full of discussion of life and love and failure and everything in between. You'll get a chance to ask your questions and to have your book signed. And I hope I get a chance to meet you all in person and to say thank you in person. So you can book your tickets now, either via the websites for Sydney Opera House or the Arts Centre Melbourne, or you can go to my website, elizabethday.org.

I have put links in the show notes and I just cannot wait to get to your fine country and to say hello in person. See you there. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure.

Rory Stewart is a writer, podcaster, former politician, adventurer and charity boss. Depending on who you speak to, he is a voice of reason, a latter-day T.E. Lawrence, a misshapen Mick Jagger, or a man who was simply too unusual to become the Tory Prime Minister he once wanted to be. Listeners to his chart-topping podcast, The Rest Is Politics, prefer to call him a centrist dad. The podcast, which launched last year, features Stuart and Alastair Campbell, the former New Labour Communications Director, disagreeing agreeably about issues of the day. It's yet another quiver in the bow of Stuart's impressive career.

After Eton at Oxford, Stuart briefly joined the army and then the diplomatic service. He wrote a best-selling book at the age of 28, The Places in Between, about a 6,000-mile walk he took across Afghanistan. At 29, he became governor of two southern Iraqi provinces after the 2003 invasion. Later, he founded a charitable foundation in Kabul. In his 30s, he was elected as an MP, rising to become the Secretary of State for International Development. He stood unsuccessfully against Boris Johnson for leadership of the Conservative Party and resigned from cabinet and later from politics entirely when his rival won. Stuart is now president of GiveDirectly, a non-profit that lets donors send money directly to the world's poorest households. His new book, Politics on the Edge, is a blistering, brilliantly written account of his decade in Parliament.

I was by turns riveted, amused and somewhat appalled by what it revealed. He writes about his experiences in Iraq that most striking was not the failure, but the failure to acknowledge our failure. Rory Stewart, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you. That quote at the end there, you're talking about a specific period in time, but do you think that's a problem for politics more generally? Yes, I think we live frozen in the sort of time of fake optimism. We find it very, very difficult to engage with reality. And there's a weird relationship, I think, between extreme optimism and sort of extreme pessimism

because they both are a refusal to engage with messy reality. There's a sort of lurching that takes place between saying everything's amazing and everything's terrible and a real reluctance to get your hands into the stuff of life, get your hands into the kind of muddy substance of things. Do you think there's also a refusal to say I don't know and to allow for ambivalence and ambiguity and periods of thoughtfulness? 100%. The one thing that you never hear from a politician is, I don't know.

They have to sound entirely confident. And one of the things that this book is about is the madness of that, that when I became the environment minister, I turn up on my first day and I'm suddenly fine. Knowing a little bit about Afghanistan things and thinking maybe I'll be the defense minister or a foreign minister

or, you know, maybe even Scotland because I'm a Scot, suddenly I'm popped into the environment. And first day, I suddenly realized that I've been put in charge of chemical spills, air quality, all the forests in Britain, natural England, the Environment Agency, three billion pounds worth of environmental spend, and all the national parks, and flooding. And I know nothing about any of it. And within about four days, you're having to stand up in Parliament or be interviewed on television and pretend you've got a grip on it. And of course, you haven't got a grip on it at all. The whole thing is a mad fantasy. And I think it both saps the personality of politicians, but also encourages the public not to feel any trust

or confidence. In terms of the book, which as I say, is brilliantly written, I really enjoy your writing, particularly when you're describing the rooms that you find yourself in, and the people that you encounter. How much did you rely on diaries that you kept at the time? I had diaries, which I wrote on the train up to Cumbria. I have, I guess, emails, WhatsApps. I mean, one of the weird things about being a politician is so much of what you do is public. So if I'm trying to remember the debate in which I made my maiden speech, the entire thing is televised and you can literally freeze frame your way through the entire, to check your memory of every phrase, the colour of someone's tie, exactly what the light looks like falling into a room. It's very, very strange to live a life which is that insanely documented.

If I want to check, you know, exactly whether I've got the colour of the wallpaper right in the coffee room in Parliament, it's there in a way that wouldn't be true in almost anything else. What's it like for you watching yourself on screen? I think it's odd because I think you never quite appear as you hope to appear. So if I look back at myself when I'm starting in Parliament in 2010, I suddenly see this very sort of awkward young boy with a sort of very formal tie and his rather boxy suits. And I kind of buttoned it up and I'm making these sort of speeches. And probably at the time, I thought I was some great confident orator. Now I look back at it and I realise this is a very sort of shy, awkward,

or not maybe shy, but certainly awkward figure. Were you or are you worried about how honest you've been in the book? Very worried, very worried. I mean, I think that one of how honest you've been in the book? Very worried, very worried. I mean, I think that one of the things I've done in the book is it's a sort of whistleblowers account. I've basically gone into the heart of Parliament and tried to reveal what goes on behind the scenes, a bit maybe in the way that a doctor or a surgeon

would take you behind the scenes in a hospital. But there's a sense in which by doing it, you're betraying your colleagues. They are relaxing with you, they're living with you, they're plotting with you over 10 years, and they're not expecting you to suddenly uncover all the messiness and dirt. The only reason I think it's justified is that Parliament really, really matters in our lives. And it's not good enough to say, well, this should all be kept secret and the public shouldn't know what's going on. But in the process, I will lose a lot of friends, a lot of people I think will be angry and I'll understand why they're angry.

You do an amazing job of unmasking the fundamental dangerous absurdity of a lot of our parliamentary processes. And the fact that so many politicians are either deliberately put in a position where they don't feel that they can oppose something, or genuinely don't seem to care because they're too ambitious. And you deliberately don't name some people, and you outline in the preface why that is. But there are definitely vignettes where you do name the person. And one of the ones that I was most shocked by,

although you end up being quite nice about her, I think, is Liz Truss, who was your boss at Defra. And you returned from a weekend and she asked you how your weekend had been. And you said, my father died. And she nodded her head and asked where the 25-point plan was that she was expecting from you. What did that encounter reveal to you about Liz Truss? My whole interaction with Liz Truss, and I also described, you know, trying to negotiate with her about national parks and many other things,

I'm trying to convey the fact that she isn't somebody who relaxes, listens and does that sort of normal human empathy. She's on transmit. She's very, very taken with particular initiatives that she wants to drive through, but she's not very interested in long, complicated conversations about them. She likes being provocative. So, you know, the classic thing is she'd say to me, Rory, I want you to cut 25% from the national parks.

And I'd say, oh, it's a sceptre state, I'm not sure we can do that. And then she'd say, OK, 10%. And I'd go, well, I think if we're going to get cut 10%, then maybe there's no point. Then she'd be like, all right, let's not cut them at all, Rory. And that's all happening in about a minute. The sense of somebody whose mind works in that way, I think,

was revealed when she became prime minister in the sort of 44 days as prime minister, that she sort of embraced this incredibly radical idea, that nobody really had an opportunity to talk it through in detail with her or point out what the problems were. And in a way, you get the impression that she quite likes the sort of provocation and the risk. The more outraged people are, the more they're like, oh, the more she sort of provocation and the risk. The more outraged people are, the more they're like, the more she sort of seems to enjoy that. Do you think empathy is a necessary skill for a successful politician? Or maybe successful is the wrong word for the kind of politician you might want to elect? Yes, I think it's central for our society. I mean, I think we live in a very, very polarized, divided society. This is a story about Parliament at a very strange moment.

My experience of Parliament was the moment where the sort of middle ground, center ground, Blairite, Clinton consensus, the 1990s, the sort of US global order is collapsing. global order is collapsing. And it's collapsing because of social media, and it's collapsing because of the financial crisis and the humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of China and all this kind of stuff. And one of the things that's happening is that public opinion, which was in the 90s, a bell jar with the votes in the center has collapsed and become a U-shape with the votes now at the extremes, nothing at the centre. And the reason why empathy is central is that it's incredibly important to be able to overcome those divisions, not think about the world as Remainers against Brexiteers, Labour against Conservative, because tribalism, which is always there, has become so much more devastatingly dangerous and corrosive in our societies. And our only hope

of navigating our way through the problem is to have some degree of empathy for others. There's a bit in your acknowledgements where you say thank you to someone who, and this is a quote from you, pointed out examples of self-obsession, complacency, and lack of sympathy in my accounts of others. Do you think those are your three key failings? Lack of sympathy, self-obsession, and complacency. I mean, I think they're definitely failings in me and in the book. I mean, I definitely think there's a criticism which is possible, which is to say, I have such a clear idea of what I think a politician should be that I find it quite difficult to have a sort of rich, nuanced sense of other ways of being a politician.

For example, my mother will often say to me that she thinks I've gone completely mad in my attacks on Boris Johnson. She just sort of wishes I'd shut up about it. And she thinks that it comes across as a bitterness that I want to keep saying this man's a monster all the time. For me, of course, it's more that I have such a clear idea of what I think a prime minister should be. And he is such an outrage to my vision of what I think a prime minister should be, that I've turned him into this kind of symbol of everything that's wrong about politics. I've made

him into a sort of British Trump in my head. And that may be, as you say, a reflection of self-obsession, that may be a lack of sympathy. I didn't say that. You said it about yourself. But yeah, sorry, carry on. No, no, anyway, that's, I think it's possible. Yeah. Okay. There are also vignettes about Boris Johnson, obviously, in Politics on the Edge. And again, one of the most memorable ones was when you meet him and he says, he prefaces what he says by saying, don't believe a word of what I'm about to say, which I interviewed Boris Johnson. I interviewed him as mayor of London. And he said this riveting thing at the end of the interview, he quoted Scarface because I was asking him if he lied and he quoted Scarface. And he said, as Scarface says,

I tell the truth even when I lie. And I thought it was such a revealing moment. But this is someone who, he tells the truth about his own lies. And yet we elected him. We'll come on to him anyway. We'll come on to him. I think he's an amazing figure. I mean, I think he's a sort of, he plays in the theatre of the absurd. He's a sort of surrealist politician. Yes.

And one of his greatest roles that he loves is i've got a six-year-old and for his fourth birthday party he had a magician that he loved and he loved the magician because the magician got all his tricks wrong so all the four-year-olds got to shout when the magician said and now i'm pulling a white rabbit out of the hat and all the four-year-olds get shot that's a stinky gym sock not a white rabbit, right? And that's basic to Boris's campaigning. So when he's running to be prime minister in 2019 in the election, he stands up in front of all these police officers with a huge crowd. And he says to the crowd, oh, police officers are clever people. They all know that thing. How does it go? You have the

right to, oh, cripes, you have the right to. And then the crowd starts shouting to remain silent, like the four-year-old, because they love the fact that this guy is, that they know more than him. They love the fact that he's playing out to them, that he's incompetent. And just like the four-year-old feels empowered to see an adult screwing everything up and that the four-year-old knows.

So the public love a politician who isn't pretending to be more knowledgeable, more competent, but instead is sort of flamboyantly saying, I'm more ignorant than you. I'm more incompetent than you. I'm more ridiculous than you. Oh, that's very interesting. Okay. Before we get onto your failures, do you like Alistair Campbell? Yes, I'm very fond of him. Okay. He's like a sort of eccentric relative. I love The Rest is Politics, and I don't know why I love it. Do you know why I love it? No, I don't know why you love it. No, it's a mystery to me. It's a complete mystery.

As you say, we chat and it's very odd. And I think if you were designing it, I asked Chat gbt what it would think about the two of us doing a podcast and it produced a very complicated nine point explanation why it would never work do you enjoy doing it yeah I do I do I do I think it's trivial I don't think it's trivial but do you think it's a bit trivial sometimes yeah yeah okay I mean I'm sure your legion of loyal listeners would disagree. And actually, I think you're doing an enormous amount to shape the way that we think about the world in a form that might feel trivial, but it isn't actually. That's my read on it.

Very good. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about, you've mentioned your mother. I'd love to talk about your father, who sounds like the most fascinating character, D-Day veteran. And I wanted just what he was like. When you were young, when you were a young child, how did your father seem to you? So my father was two things. He was, on the one hand, a very, very kind of macho, super competent. When I was a young child, he was number two in the Secret Intelligence Service.

He'd been training to land in miniature submarines off the coast of Borneo. He was a guy who got up insanely early every morning to work on his Chinese characters and everything was done at a million miles an hour. He was incredibly competent. But at the other hand, was somebody who I also felt had a deep, deep vulnerability. He was 50 when I was born. And the sort of defining moment in my childhood when I was four or five was I had left a paper airplane for him to look at with my mother, and they wouldn't look at it. So I wrote them a note saying, you won't look at my paper airplane, so I'm running away. And I went downstairs and I hid behind the curtains. Then I saw my parents coming down and I saw in my father's face a sense that he was completely broken, that he was so terrified about

what I'd done. And I immediately ran out. And I think from then onwards, I felt that part of my responsibility in life was to look after him. How beautiful. And do you feel you did? to look after him. How beautiful. And do you feel you did? Yes, I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

We had a wonderful relationship. I'm very, very fond of him, but it was a sort of odd inversions of, particularly as he got older, as he got into his 90s. I think everybody finds this, but as parents get older, that you feel that you're parenting them.

But with my father, those two strands were there from the very beginning. They were. And I suppose what that moment also revealed is his love for you, which he might not have found easy to vocalize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But actually, he was quite good at vocalizing that. Was he?

It was surprising, although he'd had this very distant father of his own. So he only saw his father, I think, something like four times in 20 years because his father was in India, and he was a little boy in a boarding school in Scotland. But he sort of compensated for that not by being a sort of cold father but by being a very sort of warm emotional father yeah I don't know if you'll want to answer this and if you don't please say so and it's fine we'll move on you have a sister who has down syndrome Fiona and I wonder what she has taught you I saw her yesterday I was in Scotland yesterday evening. We went for a walk. I mean, she's a very, very lovely person. Her life is very set. She works in an old people's home.

She's very, very focused on her dog and on our house and the rhythms of her day with my mother. on our house and the rhythms of her day with my mother. We grew up together. We shared a room when I was growing up. She's four years younger than me, and she's my only full sibling. And having Down syndrome meant that she didn't learn to read or write fluently, I suppose, until she was much, much older, until she was in her 30s. She's a really, really wonderful person, but it's a different type of human relationship

to what you might have with somebody who didn't have Down syndrome I guess. Thank you let's get on to your failures though your first failure is as you put it your failure to protect staff in Iraq so as I mentioned in the introduction you became governor of these two southern Iraqi provinces at the age of 29, very young. But tell us what happened and why you chose this as your first failure. It's an incident that I've been revisiting. And it's, as you say, it's about 20 years ago. And I was in this compound in Iraq.

And a guy that I'd had lunch with earlier in the day suddenly rung to say that he would be attacking our compound. And by the evening, we had a large group of armed men around the compound firing in rocket propelled grenades and mortars. And the civilian staff were mostly gathered, I think mostly actually in my office because it didn't have any windows. It's a sort of safe space to be in. And this went on for a couple of days and I became increasingly convinced that the attackers were going to overwhelm the compound because we weren't getting any reinforcements. I couldn't convince Baghdad to send down any planes or anything to defend us. So I guess on the second day, probably, I decided that what I needed to do was evacuate the civilian staff.

So I negotiated with the Italian military who was with us to put them in two armored vehicles and drive out the door of the compound to try to get to safety in the airbase. And I went up on the roof with the bodyguards and soldiers who'd stayed with me in the compound. with me in the compound. And as these guys drove out in their vehicle, they were attacked from both sides so that the sides of their vehicle were being hit by rockets and by machine gun fire. Then they disappeared around a corner. And that was sort of it. I didn't know what had happened to them. They made it safely to the airbase, I found out later. But our compound was never overrun because on that evening, finally, the air support came in from Baghdad and the people who were attacking us were mostly killed. So they could have remained with us and it would have been safer for them to remain with us and not be evacuated in that way. And I think the failure is partly about my living out a sort of cliche in my mind.

I think I had this sort of idea of that I was the captain on a ship and I had to get the women and children off first and I was going to remain on my ship. And that that got in the way of thinking clearly. I turned the whole thing into something more dramatic than it was. And if I'd been calmer and more thoughtful, probably was very, very unlikely that these guys were going to come over the fence and kill us all in our compound. Even though we'd convinced ourselves, I think most of us defending the compound convinced ourselves that might happen, that we were going to run out of ammunition and

they were going to come and get us. So I think that was an interesting thing because it was a combination of contradictory things inside myself. It was an incident that a time in my life that I was quite proud of because I admired so much my staff and the guys that were up there very courageously on the guns. I was pleased that, you know, I was able to, I think, think reasonably clearly and run stuff and not feel afraid. But reasonably clearly and run stuff and not not feel afraid but there was also a sense in which I fear that I got caught up too much in the kind of the narrative of the moment do you think you would ascribe that to ego yes definitely definitely definitely definitely I think it's a worrying problem of ego there which is that I don't know I I mean, I don't know. I mean, I haven't thought about this enough, but I imagine that it can be a problem in general in war, which is that if you're commanding in that

kind of situation, you can develop sort of, yeah, ideas of ego. Was there ever a sense for you that because your father was this Second World War hero, that you wanted to make him proud and live up to that? Definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely. And it mattered much more to me, probably, than it should have done, that the other people who were in that compound wrote and said they appreciated my leadership and this kind of stuff. Yes, it mattered more than it should have done to me that when people are shooting at me, I don't get particularly scared.

But you must, at don't get particularly scared. But you must at some level get scared. So you've just become very good at dealing with it and putting it somewhere. Maybe, maybe. Where does that come from? Was that something that you developed as a skill through being in the army? I don't know. Maybe I've always had it. I mean, I don't get...

So, for example, when my first son was born, he was born in our house and I delivered the baby. And the work there is all done by my wife. I mean, it's not. But equally, she felt, I think, quite relaxed. And I felt quite relaxed going through that, in part because we've worked together a lot in the world. And that or being with my father when he died, I like crisis. If I'm in a public space and something happens, my natural instinct is to rush over and try to get involved and help. And it's what I sort of like doing. You don't panic? I don't panic, no. Do you get PTSD in retrospect? Have you experienced that? I don't know. I I don't know I'm reading quite an interesting book on this at the moment I mean this is maybe more personal than needed on your

podcast but obviously I knew your sister in Iraq yes but my older sister Catherine um and I think a lot of us who were there even as civilians and many of us you know in my case I was in the Balkans then I was in Iraq and I was in Afghanistan It's possible that there was more longer term trauma than maybe we fully acknowledge about these kinds of lives. And, you know, I've had friends who've set off to New Zealand or become yogis or people who, seven, 10 years afterwards, suddenly felt a little bit more discombobulated by these experiences. But it's an odd thing to say, because we're civilians, we're not soldiers. But you know, it's not just soldiers who can experience people. Sure. Yeah. If I may, I wonder if you are clearly someone who cares very much about the world around you, who looks outward and tries to solve things for others and to

shape the kind of world we live in. And I wonder if you feel it's self-indulgent to spend time analyzing your own feelings and looking inwards. Yeah. I'm not a very good therapy subject. I'm not very good if someone says, what are you feeling right now? I don't really know how to answer that question. It takes a doctor. So you just, you don't't know so if you don't know

how you said how am i feeling i i wouldn't if you say you know what are you thinking what are you feeling i'd say i'd produce a very sort of oh well i was thinking this is quite a pink microphone that we're looking at or i was thinking um isn't it interesting that i just saw your book on the bookshelf or i mean it takes quite a lot to get me to actually understand what people mean when they're talking about thinking and feeling. Peyton, it's happening. You're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo.

All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions, if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I wondered, in relation to this failure because you were so young so effectively you were kind of more or less I mean it was the decade after university when most of us are sort of pissing around on Clapham High Street or something you're there running these provinces in Iraq. So not that far from your education. And as I mentioned in the introduction, you were educated at Eton. Eton has a great reputation for teaching its students about success. I wonder if you think they equipped you to deal with failure? I imagine so, probably. I mean, it's a very incredibly competitive environment in which competition matters all the time,

in which you're therefore perpetually failing and also succeeding. So, I mean, if we think about these sort of classic, horrible products of Eton, like Boris Johnson, I mean, there have been many, many occasions where he's failed. You know, his political career sort of blew up. He's had to resign from being a shadow minister because he said the wrong thing about Liverpool or he got caught in an affair and he ran for the leadership first time round and it collapsed and failed and but he doesn't seem to experience it like that I mean he yeah there's every there's every possibility

that he's going to try like Sam Berlusconi to come back again. And how do you, well, we'll come on to that because it's your second failure. But before we get on to that, would you send your boys to Eton? Not sure I would. I think it depends what sort of children they are. What was your boarding school experience like? Because you were sent aged eight, weren't you? And your family were in Malaysia at that stage.

So what was it like for you? I loved it. I was a very happy little boy. From day one? Very happy little boy. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Well, there goes that line of questioning. Okay, your second failure, apologies to your mother, is your failure to become Prime Minister against Boris. I listened to an episode of the Rest Is Politics spin-off podcast leading recently where you were interviewing George Osborne and you speak in that about how it's still that loss is has an enormous sense of personal loss and bitterness for you and we're now what four years. So how are you feeling about that today? Well, it's very weird.

I mean, if, like me, you think Boris Johnson is just terrible, the worst conceivable prime minister and a pretty horrible human being. Do you think he's the worst conceivable prime minister? I do, yeah. I find it very, very difficult to think of people worse than that. Okay. I mean, I think his combination of lack of seriousness, recklessness, polarizing divisive politics, culture war, contempt for our constitution

and institutions, poor policymaking, the way that he humiliated our reputation in the international stage, his endorsement recklessly of a Brexit policy that he himself didn't understand, the type of government he formed. I mean, yes, certainly the worst prime minister that Britain's ever had. Yes. Because I agree with you to an extent, but I suppose where I divert is that I don't think that everything he did was done with malicious intent. is that I don't think that everything he did was done with malicious intent. I think some of it was the result of a shambolic nature and not working hard enough or not caring enough, but it didn't feel malicious.

So I think carelessness can be more immoral than malicious intent. I think casual carelessness can have an edge of egotism, selfishness and irresponsibility to it, which is perhaps worse than somebody who's trying to do bad. So why do you think you failed? So I think the first thing is to understand just how deep that failure feels. Because if, like me, you think this is literally the worst prime minister that Britain's ever had, and that your mission is to defeat him, and that he's patently, obviously unsuitable to be prime minister, and that it would be a disgrace for our country to have someone like this as prime minister,

and that this is a very important time in British history with Brexit happening, COVID looming, our economy in shreds, and the last thing you want is this prancing buffoon to come in and humiliate us further. To lose to that, a politician's relationship with the public is a little bit like a relationship with a partner. And the public choosing to go off with Boris Johnson would be like your partner choosing to leave you for somebody that you despised in every single bit of your body, leaving you looking at your partner thinking, really? You know, in a way, you know, I completely understand if they voted for,

I don't know, David Gork instead of me, definitely I would have admired it. Probably if they'd voted for Jeremy Hunt instead of me. But Boris Johnson, I'm just left there thinking, this is mad. And what have I done wrong? How did I not explain that he has literally no plan for Northern Ireland, that he's going to cause chaos, that he doesn't understand what the customs union is? I worked for him in the foreign office and the guy is screwing things up on a daily basis, that he's going to bring in the worst possible ministers, that he is contemptuous of our constitution, that he's going to corrode our public life. So I think before I get on to why I failed, think it's just the sense that yeah the level of the failure is completely sort of bewildering I mean it's there are so many questions I want to ask you off the back of that so but remember the thing that I asked that we're coming back to so it was it a sort of identity crisis for you that level of rejection were you left questioning who you

were fundamentally absolutely and you know you're totally left thinking, what on earth is wrong with me? How can this be better than me? And, of course, part of that is beginning to think, well, maybe they're right. I mean, maybe I'm too intellectually weird. Maybe I'm too humorless. What am I lacking?

You know, what is it that they sense in this guy that I lack? Why do they think he can run the country better than I can? The book concludes with your failure to, and a particularly agonizing TV debate, which we'll come back to. There's not an enormous amount of post-match analysis. Hopefully that'll be for the next volume. But much earlier in the book book you describe being interviewed for a newspaper in Scotland and something that you said to that journalist was then picked up and became a sort of media scandal where you were quoted as saying I don't want to get it wrong but the quoted saying there are some pretty primitive areas in my constituency and there are people holding their

trousers up with twine that's what I said yeah because the journalist was making the point you know what would you know and actually there's a rich constituency and it was then kind of paraphrased to make it sound the worst possible Rory Stewart calls his constituents primitive I find that passage very moving because you write openly about how you took that so deeply to heart that it's the first time you've thought of ending your life. Yeah. Did you have a similar feeling after failing to become PM? Yes, I mean, I didn't think of ending my life,

but I was very thrown off balance. I went into an 11-day silent retreat not very long afterwards. Did you? And for the first four, five days, sitting, meditating 14 hours a day without speaking, my entire right knee began sort of vibrating with strange kind of pains that were, I sort of thought, psychosomatic. It was like Boris Johnson was living in my right knee. And I then ran to be mayor of London as an independent. And that, I think, was partly an attempt to try to say, I'm not going to take this lying down. I'm going to fight for a different vision of British politics.

I can't just be thrown out in this way. And then that failed in a different way because COVID came along. The election was cancelled. So for me, COVID was a very important kind of healing period in my life. I went to Scotland with my children and I spent nine months moving stones, trying to create a garden. And I think that's really what brought me out of this. Insofar as I've come out of it at all.

I mean, you might argue that I'm still kind of overly obsessed by the, I mean, completely obsessed with populism. Yes. How does Boris Johnson represent populism? What is populism? Where does it come from? And how does a country that I thought was a very kind of consensual, common sense country,

where we all focus on what we have in common, becomes this divided, angry nation? Populism, post-truth and polarisation, I've learned from the rest of politics. What's a silent retreat like? I've always been intensely intrigued and admiring of people who can do it. I love it. I mean, if I didn't have a small family, I'd be doing 40 days of retreats. So you go somewhere and it's an actual retreat that is...

Yeah, you go there and there's a routine. I mean, it's a sort of semi-Buddhist monastery. So you are woken just after four in the morning. You start meditating at 4.30 in the morning. Goes through to 6.30 in the morning, you have a break. Then you start again at seven. You get on and on and on late into the night. Not very late at night, 9.30 at night.

And then stagger off to bed again and you wake up in this morning. But you can't talk to anybody at any point. And you sit in the dark. Did it teach you an enormous amount about yourself yes yeah very fundamental things you're really quite buddhist aren't you there's a silent retreats there's the dry stone walling there's the walking i mean rory stewart really loves a walk and it's all about this sort of meditative connection with something greater than you, it seems. Yeah. Huh. Do you meditate daily as a daily practice? I do, yes.

Good. I'm relieved you're doing some processing. Okay. So coming back to the question of the failure to stand against Boris Johnson, you have spoken about how you are still coming to terms with the idea of it being a personal rejection. But I also believe you were failed by the systems. And you do write this passage about this final TV debate, which is very funny in parts and very self-effacing. But it felt there that you struggled to get a word in edgeways. And you kept sort of trying to court various MPs who you thought might back you. And they'd make all these positive noises, and then you'd discover in the next day's paper that they'd actually back Boris Johnson.

So how much do you think the failure was a systemic one? I mean, it must reflect the whole context of things. So I think that the first thing is that for some reason, many good reasons, a lot of colleagues didn't think that I was the guy that was going to win the leadership. And they felt that Boris was going to win. He was a winner. So success sort of breeds success. And in a way, when I try to have a conversation with them and say, but we all know Boris, he's an awful person, he can be a terrible prime minister. Their response was, well, that doesn't really matter because he's going to win. I've had this sort of rather lovely thing yesterday when I was on the tube of a former colleague coming up and saying, Rory, I just

wanted to apologize because I remember very much that call you made to me asking me to vote for you. And I didn't. And I now want to say I'm really sorry and I should have done and don't blame yourself for losing and it wasn't your fault. So she was sort of slightly working around this thing. But I think to be fair to her, the reason she didn't support me is that at some level, she didn't think I could win. Do you think the Conservative Party should change its voting system for leaders? Absolutely. Yeah, it, this thing, that the decision is made by just over 100,000 Conservative members. When my mother was a member of the Conservative Party in the 50s, we're over 2 million members. It's now down to 100,000. And it's completely undemocratic.

Be more democratic, in fact, to let the MPs decide, because at least they're elected by their constituents. Because I think you would have won had that not been the way of... I would have had a better chance. I'm not sure I would have won, but I would have had a better chance. I mean, it was a very odd system. I mean, there's also elements of chances. If Sajid Javid had got one less vote on the Monday evening... Fewer. One fewer. That's very good. Lovely. One fewer vote on the Monday evening. You sound like Alastair Catton. I know, that's why I did it. He would have been knocked out.

And if I was lucky, I would have got a substantial chunk of his votes. And I might have been able to then move ahead of Michael Gove. And if Michael Gove had been knocked out, I would have got his votes and moved ahead of Jeremy Hunt. I could have been in the last two. And the question is then, what would it take for me to beat Boris Johnson in the last two at that historical period? And I think the problem is that even if I had been very, very, very lucky, this very narrow path and won, I would have inherited a party that was in complete civil war. And where Ian Duncan Smith and the right of the Conservative Party and the hardline Brexiteers

would have been so horrified that I'd won. And I would have been gambling everything on moving the party back to the centre ground and picking up votes in the centre. And I could have broken the party. I lost the whole right of the party, could have gone off and joined UKIP or whatever. Yes. It was a very strange moment. I mean, what Boris chose to do was the opposite. He locked off the sort of left, the sort of centre of the party. Yeah. Chucked out me and another 20 people to consolidate on the right i guess the issue with being a politician

is that your failure doesn't simply feel personal it feels like it has enormous scope and resonance and so how responsible do you feel for what i believe to be the United Kingdom's current state of chaos and crisis? Do you feel responsible for that? Yes, yes, I do. Yes, I do. And I could have done much better. I could have done much better in that BBC debate. I could have done much better as a politician in the nine years leading up.

There were probably three things that I learned too late in politics. There were probably three things that I learned too late in politics, and if I'd learned them earlier, I might have had a chance of playing a bigger part in steering Britain away from this catastrophe. One of them is we need, in the center ground, people like me, to express a sense of shame much more clearly. We need to acknowledge how bad things are for a lot of people in this country. We sound often too complacent as though there's some technocratic fix. And actually, many lives are horrible. The second thing is, I needed a much, much clearer sense of simple, clear ideas. Twice, probably, maybe three times my political career i found those ideas and it changes everything prisons being able to say i'll resign unless i reduce violence in the leadership saying i'm going to stop a no deal brexit i'm going to stop boris getting out of the temptation

of sort of intellectualizing and producing sort of endless complex accounts getting that clarity and then i think the third thing is genuinely having the ideas. I mean, what is the solution to the state of our economy? Because populism isn't just a sort of product of social media or the cunning of Boris Johnson. It genuinely reflects the fact that incomes are stagnant, productivity is stagnant, too much wealth has flowed into London and the Southeast. And I never managed in nine years to really articulate a clear economic vision on how to fix those things. I am an example of a broader failure of our political class to grasp our historical moment, produce the right emotion, the right logic, the right ethics to transform it.

Your final failure doesn't immediately sound interesting, but it is. It's your failure to improve overseas aid as DFID minister. Tell us about that. Well, so the truth there is that there were 170 million people living in extreme poverty in Africa in 1980. There are 470 million people living in extreme poverty today. Extreme poverty is people living on under $2 a day. These are people who eat one meal a day, are in a mud room with a roof that leaks, sleeping on the floor with no soap and water for their kids, with their children often not in education. I mean, lives of extreme destitution. And in the 80s and 90s, we were going to make poverty history and we were having live aid concerts and all this kind of stuff. And we lost momentum. The

international liberal order collapsed. We've become isolationists. The aid budgets have been cut to pieces. All hope has really gone from this field. And I was right at the heart of that change. I took over a department with a $20 billion budget. And I'd been in that department as a junior minister before. I ought to have been the perfect person for that job because I'd spent so many years of my life working in this field. And after I went, Boris Johnson took over, hacked the aid budget, dismantled DFID, and contributed to something

that's gone beyond Britain. Sweden's doing it and Norway's doing it. Basically gave up on the global poor in Africa. So that's a failure for me because there are things that we could have done to keep the hope alive, to transform those lives. We had huge abilities with $20 billion a year. If I'd just given it away in cash, I now run a charity called GiveDirectly. I believe very strongly that if I'd set up a program of giving away $20 billion a year in cash over five years, we could have transformed the lives of 200, 300 million people. Again, you did try.

of 200, 300 million people. Again, you did try. You did try and do that, but it struck me reading your book that DFID, the civil servants who worked there, came across as eminently self-satisfied with how things already were and resistant to change. Is that fair? They were very impressive people, actually.

And in some ways, they were right and I was wrong. I mean, they were much more in favor of cash assistance than I was in those days. They were very conscious of how delicate their situation was and that they were conscious that their budget could be cut and their department could be abolished. They just had a very different view on how to deal with that. They thought the way to deal with that is to be very legalistic about it and produce ever more detailed business cases. My view on how to deal with that was to completely reform ourselves and become much more practical and learn much more about these countries and communicate what we were doing much better. But in a way, we were both probably doomed that the Daily Mail was coming after us anyway,

whichever path we went down, because the forces of populism and isolation, which I keep referring to, we went down because the forces of populism and isolation, which I keep referring to, were going to overwhelm us. So I think, you know, a lot of these failures are working out to what extent taking individual responsibility for things which are structural is also not all, it might not also be a form of egotism. Yes. That overly emphasizing my failures may be narcissistic that actually, yes, that it's not all my fault, because it's not all about me. Great point. Do you ever feel crushed by the futility? As in, I wonder if you long to have been born in a different era, either one past or one yet to come. It feels that we're living through a series of transitional crises.

And for whatever reason, we are here on this planet trying to make sense of this and do our best. But I wonder if that ever feels exhausting to you. I think it's exhausting, but largely the exhausting is not the crisis. It's trying to work out how you live a life in the middle of that. So the way in which I engage with it personally is I'm running a charity, which is mostly in Africa. I'm doing my podcast. I'm giving speeches. I'm writing. And I think probably the mistake I make is that I get too busy.

You know, I'm speaking to you having been on a different plane every day for the last, I don't know, 12 days. I don't know, 12 days, and to really engage with these crises, climate crisis, crisis of poverty, artificial intelligence, populism. I think I can do it. I think I could be useful. I'm curious about the world. I like communicating. I think I have a theory of these things. What I have to do, as a note to myself, is to somehow give myself the time and the space to work out how to as it were put my chisel at the right spot in the block of marble and hit it in the right way rather than what I'm doing at the moment which is sort of chipping around its surface so you're in a process of transition too you're yeah so when you're in your 90s and you look back on your life, can you answer this question? Now, maybe you can't, but how do you think, looking back, you will feel that was meaningful?

What's your metrics? I think the paradox, obviously, for all of us is that clearly at one level, things are deeply humanly meaningful. At another level, they're not at all. I mean, I'm very conscious, partly through my meditation, that what works for me there is that I become very conscious of myself as a sort of irrelevant floating atom in the universe. I'm very, very conscious of my death and the impermanence of me and the world, and that even the person I am now isn't really the person who was there in my late 20s. And it doesn't really matter what I did in that compound in Iraq because I'm not that person anymore. If I make it to my 90s and die, I don't think I'll be looking back on my life like a sort of obituary trying to think,

did I take this? Did I do that? Did I achieve that? I think each second is equally valuable and that that last second, whether it's in my 90s or whether it's next week, is inherently as valuable as every other second. It's this second when I'm talking to you, the second when I walk outside and look at the sun, or the second when I'm humiliated by Boris Johnson. How beautiful, apart from that last bit. We're coming to the end of our time. Would you ever launch your own political grassroots movement and just shake up the entire system? Yes, maybe. Great system. Yes, maybe. Great news. Yes, maybe.

But I'd have to work out whether that's the thing to do. I mean, the silly analogy I'm using at the moment of the world being a sort of block of stone and you've got a chisel. And my feeling at the moment, what I'm doing is sort of scraping off the surface and not finding the right angle to cleave it apart. Does that come through a grassroots movement? Does it come through something else? Yes. Does it come through something else yes does it come through my spending the next two years really thinking about artificial intelligence does it come through my work on poverty in africa i mean i don't know and to answer that i need time and

space and i need to take some time to relax you probably need a an at least a 1000 mile walk knowing your process as i do that would be great okay final question have you ever played shag marry kill shag marry kill yes that sounds like a really bad game for me that sounds like the kind of game have you ever played it no and I presume who would I shag who would I marry who would I kill can I ask you the question with three individuals that I've chosen off the top of my head I'm not allowed to say you know you in response to every single one of those. No, no, no. And also the killing, it doesn't have to be killing. It could be avoid. Let's just say avoid because killing always sounds quite sort of extreme.

Well, obviously I would avoid Boris Johnson. I know, but he's not going to be in my three. Okay. My three are Alistair Campbell, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. You have to shag one, you have to marry one, and you have to avoid slash kill. You have to do something desperate to the third one. Well, I suppose I'd be more likely to have an affair with Alistair Campbell and marry Rishi Sunak.

Oh, oh. Okay. Well, that's good. What a lovely note to end on. And I'm sure Alistair Campbell will be thrilled by knowing that, you know. Thank you. Thank you for that. You want to take this one step further in an intimate setting.

Rory Stewart, this has been a delight. I've loved it. Thank you so much for making time for How to Fail when you have such an extremely successful podcast of your own. And thank you also for trying to make a difference. Lovely. Thank you for your time. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently, it helps other people know that we exist.