He’s been an author, a diplomat, a soldier, a cabinet minister – and still dreams of changing the world. The recovering Tory talks about his friendship with Alastair Campbell, the gaffes that haunt him and his fears about Boris Johnson
Rory Stewart has long been a man out of time. At three, he named his rocking horse Bucephalus, after Alexander the Great’s famed steed. At six, he was reading Jane Austen. At 29, he walked across rural Afghanistan, dodging Taliban fighters, to emulate the derring-do of the 18th-century explorers he grew up idolising. At 30, he was made deputy governor of Maysan province during the Iraq war, effectively serving as the modern equivalent of a colonial administrator. “I always wanted to try to live a life that would feel like a storybook,” the former Conservative MP muses on a video call from New York.
Only now, at 49, is Stewart plunging into the zeitgeist, as a hit podcaster. The Rest Is Politics, which he presents with the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, regularly tops the UK podcast charts. He has found an unlikely following among liberal-leaning politics fans who would typically shun anything to do with an ex-Tory cabinet minister, but give Stewart a pass because of his willingness to excoriate Boris Johnson and share juicy titbits of Conservative party gossip.
