Rory Stewart, 51, has been a diplomat, an academic, an adventurer and a politician. He served as a deputy governor in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Between 2010 and 2019 he was a Conservative MP for Penrith and the Border, resigning having lost a leadership election to Boris Johnson. His podcast with Alastair Campbell, The Rest Is Politics, boasts more than 200,000 regular listeners; his book, Politics on the Edge, now out in paperback, reflects on his decade in government.
Do you think we’re seeing the death of the Tory party?
I think there are two possibilities. One is it experiences defeat, it recognises it’s got itself on the wrong path and it moves back to the centre, which is what happened, broadly speaking, under David Cameron. The other is that it experiences defeat as confirmation that it needs to lean ever further to the right – the temptation of the Suella Braverman faction or even out to the fringes of Nigel Farage.
