There’s a particular kind of figure in transatlantic public life to whom success, adventure and power seem to come with ease. They tend to dabble in history, lead distinguished lives in Westminster or Whitehall, moonlight as academics, get offered Chairs at prestigious universities and editorships or directorships of legendary institutions. They deplore Brexit, though force themselves to pay lip service to the workings of democracy that landed us with it.
They are, as we are never allowed to forget, the “grownups” in the room and their ringleader, the most irritating “grownup” of all, is Rory Stewart.
A humble-bragger par excellence, he manages to be both an exceptionally posh boy – the Dragon School in Oxford, Eton, Balliol, the Bullingdon, says things like “going tonto” instead of “went mad” – and furiously projects a down-with-the-people magnanimity and bold interest in their lives.
Typical of this were his “RoryWalks” videos, uploaded during his campaign for Tory leader in 2019, which showed him going round Britain talking to voters about their lives and concerns. He likes to throw his hat in various rings, then pull or be pushed back – as Conservative leader (2019), as a member of the Conservative party itself (shortly thereafter losing the whip in 2019 for his anti-no-deal Brexit stubbornness), for mayor (he withdrew in 2020 because of the delay in the race caused by Covid). Rumoured to be in the offing for the chancellorship of Oxford, he ruled himself out, humble-bragging that: “there are much better candidates than me”.
Since 2022, the Brady-Johnson professor of Grand Strategy at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, erstwhile New York Times contributor and author of Politics on the Edge, has further amplified his two cents with a chart-topping podcast with Alastair Campbell – The Rest is Politics. This is a slyly dorky, and meaningless, riff on Hamlet’s dying “the rest is silence”.
I suspect that it’s easy to be a grownup when success flies at you… and sticks. Straight out of Oxford, our sensible friend Rory joined the Foreign Office, which gave him two-years’ leave to walk across the most dangerous parts of Asia. This, plus time in Iraq and Afghanistan, led to a clutch of bestselling books and television programmes.
For such a well-rounded, cultured and above all luxuriously educated fellow, it raised a few eyebrows last week when
Stewart plugged a Radio 4 programme he is presenting on the wonders of ignorance.
“Ignorance has an extraordinary often positive role in our creative, artistic and political lives – I’ve been working with some wonderful thinkers to explore the power of ignorance on [Radio 4],” tweeted Stewart.
Simon Schama, another classic grownup but a historian with serious scholarly chops and a sincere moral interest in all he studies, immediately smelt the rat. “Ignorance never helped creative art – ever – with knowledge under siege this is the worst possible time to be imagining it as a positive force for anything. Whose terrible idea is this?”
Quite so. The idea that “ignorance” – the first port of call for Isis, the Nazis and other world-destroyers and totalitarians who begin by smashing ancient sites, libraries and burning books – is somehow a creative virtue is cynical at best and evil at worst.
It’s certainly hard to imagine that the Yale professor of Grand Strategy was hired because of his love of ignorance. And perhaps this is a small off-note; there are programmes and “thinkers” exploring everything under the sun. But it speaks to a longer history of cynical slipperiness.
Stewart was a Conservative would-be leader who admires Jeremy Corbyn.
Despite the latter’s direct responsibility for the sewer of anti-Semitism that the Labour Party became, Stewart condemned, rather than condoned, the decision by Starmer to bar Corbyn from Labour.
Such amorality is never far from view. “Usually, when I go into a voting lobby, I panic,” he told The Guardian’s Tim Adams in June, when asked how he would vote this election.
“I guess my hand will once again float over Labour, but will probably come down on Lib Dems or the Greens.”
I am glad that British public life still contains intellectuals and polymaths. But we could do without the posturing of sage men who rise above the petty politics of Westminster and passion of partisanship – all while being the most perfect creatures of Whitehall, the best at negotiating power and enjoying the fine things of life whether while smoking opium at lavish weddings in Iran, as Stewart has done, or sipping brandy at the Athenaeum club, of which he is a member.
Stewart isn’t the only grand, and grandly self-loving, grownup that irks. Others include: his fellow podcaster and Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell; the insufferable George Osborne, who tanked the armed forces before going on to edit the Evening Standard and chair the British Museum; and, inevitably, David Cameron, whose recent “grownup” stint in the foreign office involved showing his disdain for Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. The Arabist embrace of the Foreign Office in particular and Whitehall in general is always seductive to the grownups.
Rory and co might think they have the answer to everything – but as their own history shows, they don’t.
Indeed, sometimes it takes someone with a bit of honesty and backbone, someone familiar from early on with the taste of personal failure, of rejection, of struggle, to know what’s best for the rest of us.
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