The BBC recently finished broadcasting Rory Stewart’s five-part treatise on heroism.
We learned that morality wasn’t always a heroic value, the First World War killed our enlightened interpretation of heroism, and we should “leave a legacy”.
In one episode Stewart disinterestedly informed listeners that many saw him as something of a heroic figure himself:
I’m brave in a kind of boring way, so that when people shoot at me I don’t get scared. And I notice that people get very impressed by this.
This is the latest example of Stewart’s obsessive grappling with heroism which has been going on for some decades now. He is very keen to let you know that he isn’t Alexander or T.E. Lawrence — and he is not trying to be any more. He may have seemed it what with his long walks and fleeting diplomatic positions, dramatic details of which made their way to the press with remarkable frequency.
Stewart’s career is really one of dogged self-promotion
Typical fare for Stewart, who has for years deployed a bait-and-switch double image of himself as a romantic hero and jaded, system-weary figure. One who has laid down his arms and is content to “go micro”.
Stewart’s career is really one of dogged self-promotion.
A Google search for him reveals puff pieces stretching back decades. As early as 2008, articles appeared promoting the idea that Rory was so remarkable that Hollywood wanted to make a film about his life to date. It was understood by the press that Orlando Bloom would be in the role of Stewart the hero. 17 years later there is no sign of the film.
After joining the Foreign Office in a junior role, Stewart served as “Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator” of two Iraqi provinces, an administrative post which held no particular power, all decisions being taken centrally in Baghdad and very occasionally by the American governor. He achieved absolutely nothing. Stewart’s time seems to have been mainly spent assembling the draft of the inevitable book he produced about his starring role in Iraq (Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq, alternatively titled The Prince of the Marshes). In that book even he admits that his presence had been futile.
“When I returned to Amara in March 2005… I found almost no record of our projects and initiatives,” he sniffed.
In an exalted moment some years later Rory detailed that founding and running an “art school in Kabul” was “actually far more satisfying than when I’d been theoretically the coalition deputy governor of an Iraqi province with two and a half million people,” enjoying at his command “eye watering budgets and incredible power and military units and armoured vehicles – where I achieved nothing and where I felt that that sort of power is very empty because you don’t actually do anything with it.”
Stewart then went on to Afghanistan after c0nvincing Prince Charles to give him a job in an architectural NGO. Very shortly, articles began appearing in the international press about the amazing new Afghanistan expert, Rory Stewart.
“Can Rory Stewart Fix Afghanistan?” was the breathless headline of an article in the National Geographic. The accompanying photoshoot had a semi-blurred Stewart standing in front of a disheveled wooden archway wearing an Afghan Karakul hat and thick brown duffel coat.
Real Afghan experts were not impressed. Ahmed Rashid, author of the seminal work on the Taliban, commented: “He doesn’t have really a sense of the history of the place. He’s a late arrival to the Afghan conundrum that has been going on for thirty years.” Saad Mohseni, who heads the most prominent Afghan media group, said “If I was to walk with a dog from New York City to New Jersey, would I become an expert on U.S. politics?”
Mohseni was referring to another of Stewart’s tactics — to claim huge expertise because he went on a long walk. In truth, long walks sound romantic but do not bestow magical levels of understanding. Stewart’s claim to expertise on Afghanistan was a month crossing a fairly safe part of the country. “Other people would call it a walking holiday,” commented an old hand on Afghanistan. In 2011, just over a year after Rory resigned himself to being a Conservative MP , he claimed that at the end of his walk across Afghanistan he no longer felt he “had so much to prove any more.” Stewart failed to replicate this book-under-pillow tactic of wisdom acquisition when he announced he would walk around London as part of his doomed mayoral campaign.
Stewart trades heavily on his Afghan and Iraq experience, claiming in his 2019 attempt to take the Conservative leadership that having negotiated in Iraq and Afghanistan he could “handle the Tories.” “Must mean the negotiation of work contracts with Sloanes looking for gap year opportunities at his Kabul NGO,” commented the writer on Afghanistan Jonathan Bone.
In 2008 Rory left Afghanistan and became a Conservative candidate in the 2010 election, although he had never previously supported the party, having in 1997 applauded the Labour victory. In 2007 he attacked the Conservatives’ “feel-good, idea-light” policies and commented of David Cameron’s party that “Churchill has been replaced by Bertie Wooster”.
Stewart admitted that he could easily have gone with Labour, saying of a meeting he had in Kabul with a visiting Labour minister that “I was incredibly charmed by him and, you know, if he’d said, ‘Would you like to work with me?’ I probably would have been tempted.”
His scattered record of policy ideas since then suggests it might have been a better choice. In his Commons office in 2011, Rory — again lamenting the death of the hero — remarked of Michael Foot and Enoch Powell that “they tried to live as sort of grand classical figures and took themselves deeply seriously and saw politics as this grand vocation. Unfortunately they end up looking ludicrous in the modern world – the modern world doesn’t give you the space to take yourself seriously in that kind of way.”
By the end of his stint in the Commons he would try to assume leadership of the UK government.Stewart has repeatedly claimed to have thrown off his mantle of heroic ambition for a quieter life of reasoned polemicism, and every time — be it a mayoral race, a leadership campaign — he has tried to take it on again.
Rory has made ten edits to his own Wikipedia page since the New Statesman revealed he was polishing his digital silver under the moniker “Chezza88.” Chezza describes his recent alterations to other Wikipedia editors as “moving current job to the beginning,” adding a section on “Sales of Politics on the Edge,” and “removing unsubstantiated claim that he claimed to speak ‘distinguished’ German.” Note the third person. His excuse the first time round was that the account was “heavily used by parliamentary office, leadership and London Campaign teams,” none of which still exist.
If not his self-reported heroism then at least Rory has his expertise to rely on. On 4th November last year he cemented his position on the US election: “This won’t be a close race decided by a ‘couple of thousand votes’ … Kamala Harris will win.” He replied to a commenter who gently prodded him on the possibility he might be wrong: “Obviously if I’ve totally miscalled this it would be a massive lesson in humility.”
