Tumultuous political failure

Rory Stewart is brilliant, charming, singular, and thoroughly obnoxious. His memoir, How Not to Be a Politician, would not be to many reader's taste, but I found it fun and informative.

Stewart is a Brit/Scot from an upper class professional family. I first became aware of Stewart when he served in various military and administrative roles among Brits allied in our Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the '00s -- and became a smart and vocal critic of the U.S. occupation's absurdities and dysfunction. As well he might have -- before these wars, he had famously walked across Iraq, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Nepal. He knew something about these people and places, unlike the North American bumblers with the guns and his own British politicians.

On returning home, he decided he needed to do something about all this. In 2010, he declared himself a Tory (that's the Conservative Party) and through luck and accident managed to win the opportunity to contest and win the remote district of Penrith and the Border adjacent to Scotland. He was now a Member of Parliament. Through a series of kerfuffles, policy controversies, and administrative misadventures, he survived as a Tory Member through 2019 when he ran for party leadership in a failed effort to avert a Boris Johnson government and a chaotic implementation of Brexit.

The policy strands of this memoir are what political memoirs usually center on, concerns like rural development in his isolated home constituency, an effort to extricate Britain from America's Middle Eastern wars, whether to leave the European Union via Brexit, and once his Remain position lost the popular referendum, how to carry out the people's will with the least damage to the country.

That's all important, but what made this an interesting account for me was his picture of how the accreted quasi-system that is Britain's unwritten political constitution was functioning. Not well. Now -- Americans have nothing to crow about as we struggle to preserve popular democracy within a written Constitutional framework constrained by such immovable absurdities as the Electoral College and the rule that every state gets two Senators regardless of the size of its population. But Stewart argues convincingly that British government is even more irrational.

He recounts his orientation to his new job from his Party legislative leader:

We should not regard debates as opportunities for open discussion; we might be called legislators but we were not intended to overly scrutinize legislation ... 'I always try to get consensus as chief whip,' the chief whip concluded, 'and the consensus is that the prime minister is right.'

... Even the most rebellious MPs, famous for their obstreperousness, voted against the government in perhaps only five votes out of a hundred. All of which raised certain questions about the theory that MPs were independent legislators ...

Finding that his job as a backbencher was to be an automaton, Stewart worked on improving the lives of his constituents (notably by increasing broadband in the countryside) and finagled to get into one of the junior ministerial positions open to MPs. In this respect the system is very different from the United States.

Ambitious Members from the governing party are chosen by the prime minister to exercise executive authority in the various departments of government. But unlike cabinet members in the U.S. who genuinely attempt to direct the departments to which they are appointed by presidents, MPs continue as legislators; their sub-cabinet and cabinet appointments are add-ons. No particular expertise in the actual work -- such as preserving the environment, running prisons, or foreign aid -- is expected or required to become a minor minister. In fact, expertise was the reverse of what was sought; Conservative leaders sure didn't want Stewart having any authority over anything about Afghanistan or central Asia where he knew the ropes and the languages.

Stewart quickly learned that the permanent civil servants, accurately, figured that uninterested junior ministers came and went and could be ignored, politely. He recounts perhaps instituting some interesting reforms in the under-funded, under-appreciated prison system -- until he was abruptly moved on. Insofar as Stewart is fair and accurate, this seems a hell of an undemocratic way to run a government.

The stresses of governing after the destabilizing Brexit vote eventually did in Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May; ushered in the frivolous, self-aggrandizing leadership of Boris Johnson; and led through short prime ministerial tenures to this year's resounding replacement of the Tories with a Labour government. By then, Stewart was long gone. But his account of the early stages of the Tory self-immolation is cutting.

[In 2019] for eight and a half years, the government had been an elective dictatorship run by the prime minister, and Parliament an elderly, smelly Labrador, asleep by the fire. Once a year, perhaps, someone would step so hard on our tail that we would snap, and in doing so stop the redesigning of the House of Lords, or the Syria bombing; but generally we were entirely passive. We, the Conservative MPs voted loyally for the government day in and day out, late into the night.

But Brexit had transformed the conventions of British politics. The generally loyal, if grumpy, mass of Conservative MPs had been turned into warring Brexiteers and Remainers. ...

... authority was leaching away from all of us. The referendum, by giving a direct say to the general public, had made Parliament a low-lying island in a rough and rising sea. And many of the people, having 'spoken', began to perceive parliamentary debates and votes as just different forms of obfuscation, delay and betrayal.  ...

When the Party deposed Theresa May, Stewart felt he had to run for leadership because the more obvious candidates would not dare to state what to him was obvious:

... none of them was prepared to say that Boris Johnson was manifestly unsuitable to be prime minister. ... to put an egotistical character like Boris Johnson in the heart of a system that was already losing its dignity, restraint and seriousness was to invite catastrophe...

Stewart was proved right, of course. Often being right does not lead to popularity. 

His memoir has a supercilious tone that I am sure was endlessly grating to his colleagues. The guy is the opposite of a team player. He comes across as pretty sure he knows it all -- and sometimes he does. But the result is an delicious record of tumultuous political failure. I'm glad to have read it.