S18, Ep3 Rory Stewart on why politics is broken - and what to do about it

0:00It's Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better with Jonathan Van Ness. It's easy to feel hopeless, but we don't have to stay there. I'm all about finding places where we can turn that energy into hope and into action. One of those places is Americans United for separation of church and state. Americans United, or AU, is this quiet but mighty force, working every day to preserve freedom without favor and equality without exception. I am so obsessed with that tagline. And let me tell you something, honey. That wall between church and state, paper thin. It's got a leak, honey. It's one of the last safeguards protecting so many of our rights.

0:33So right now, from bodily autonomy to LGBTQ plus rights to the future of public schools, to me, this is about creating a world where everyone gets to live as themselves as long as you're not harming anyone else. Now is not the time to curl up and hide. It's the time to link arms and stand together for a better future. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and their growing movement because church-state separation protects us all. Learn more and join the fight at au.org slash better. Let's go, Americans United! I am so excited and not a little astonished to announce that I am coming to Australia.

1:11I 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 Arts 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 endeavor. And I am really, really giddy with anticipation at the thought of meeting you all.

1:55I 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.

2:46Hello 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.

3:29Lawrence, 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 and Oxford, Stewart 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.

4:14At 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 Give Directly, 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.

5:01I 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 a 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.

5:50There'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 % that 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, you know, 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 foreign minister, or, you know, maybe even Scotland, because I'm a Scot, suddenly I'm popped into the environment.

6:42And firstly, 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.

7:19In 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 to check your memory of every phrase, the color of someone's tie, exactly what the light looks like falling into a room.

8:04It's very, very strange to live a life which is that insanely documented. If I want to check exactly whether I've got the color of the wallpaper right in the coffee room in Parliament, it's there in a way that wouldn't be true and 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'm kind of buttoned it up and I'm making these sort of speeches.

8:41And probably at the time I thought I was some great confident an orator. Now I look back at it, 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 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.

9:20They 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.

9:56And 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.

10:41What did that encounter reveal to you about Liz Truss? My whole interaction with Liz Truss, and I also describe, 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.

11:21And I'd say, oh, Settlement 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 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.

11:55The more outraged people are, the more they're like, oh, 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 in 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.

12:35And 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 centre, has collapsed and become a U-shape with the votes now at the extremes, nothing at 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.

13:19And our only hope of navigating our way through the problems 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, 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.

14:03For 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 a sort of 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.

14:35And 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, is 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.

15:06He 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.

15:43And 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 to shout, 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.

16:17You 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.

16:53OK, before we get onto your failures, do you like Alistair Campbell? Yes, I'm very fond of him. He's like a sort of eccentric relative. I love the rest of his 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 we're 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 Yeah.

17:35Okay. 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 wonder 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.

18:13When 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. It 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.

18:50So I wrote them a note saying, you won't look at my paper airplane. So I hid behind the curtains and 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? Yes, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. We had a wonderful relation. 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.

19:33But with my father, those two strands were there from the very beginning. And I suppose what that moment also revealed is his love for you, which he might not have found easy to vocalise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But actually, he was quite good at vocalising that. 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.

20:06I 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 very, very focused on her dog and on our house and the rhythms of her day, of 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.

20:53She'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. Thank you. Let's get on to your failures. 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 prophecies 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.

21:33And 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.

22:12So 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 air base. And I went up on the roof with the bodyguards and the soldiers who'd stayed 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.

22:49I didn't know what had happened to them. They made it safely to the air base, 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 to the end.

23:29And 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.

24:08I was pleased that, you know, I was able to, I think, think reasonably clearly and run stuff and 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 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.

24:50Was 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 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 or maybe I've always had 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.

25:51And 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 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.

26:25Yes, my older sister, Catherine. My older sister. 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, And, you know, I've had friends who've set off to New Zealand or become yogis or people who seven, ten 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.