Soon after he was elected as a Conservative MP, Rory Stewart tried to sit down next to a party colleague. “This seat is reserved,” the MP growled at him. Stewart pointed out there was no “prayer card” in the brass holder at the back of the seat, meaning it was free. The unnamed Tory glowered. “Why don’t you just fuck off,” he told Stewart. Subsequently, piqued by Stewart’s election to the foreign affairs select committee, the same MP threatened to punch him on the nose.
Stewart’s memoir of his nine years in British politics is filled with similarly grim and darkly amusing episodes. It is an excoriating account of a dysfunctional governing system. At every level – backbench MP, senior minister, permanent secretary – Stewart finds shallowness where there should be depth, vapidity instead of seriousness. His book is a brilliant insider portrait of a nation in decline, penned by an exasperated modern Boswell.
