It’s not immediately obvious that Rory Stewart has got the hang of this Tory leadership thingy. For the past two weeks, he has bunked off from the Department for International Development to go walkabout on bridges, in gardens and in town centres to talk to anyone he can find. And if no one’s around, then he’s been as happy to spend the time using his telescopic arms to film himself talking just to himself. Sometimes he even agrees with himself.
As a spectacle, it’s had a certain charm. Most of the other leadership contenders wouldn’t be seen dead talking to real people and have devoted their energies to making campaign videos that veer from the weirdly amateur to the outright psychopathic. With every new appearance, Dominic Raab increasingly resembles a man who views Hannibal Lecter movies as self-help documentaries. The anger is so barely repressed you expect his hand to explode through the screen and slit your throat. All done with the perfect rictus smile. It’s what you would have wanted.
The problem for Stewart is that he has spent most of his time either speaking to the wrong people or saying the wrong things. Because the only people he has managed to win over are the people who would never dream of voting Conservative anyway. He is the candidate everyone who isn’t a Tory wants to win the Tory leadership. Appearing compassionate and reasonable – a genial David Attenborough exploring the UK’s natural habitats – is not the way to win over the hearts and minds of the Tory grassroots.
A more fundamental error has been that he has failed to understand the rules of the leadership race. The people he most needs to impress aren’t the electorate or even the 120K Tory members. They are the 312 other Tory MPs whose support he will need to survive to the final ballot. So far he has just five. Victoria Prentis, Nicholas Soames, Ken Clarke, David Gauke and Antoinette Sandbach. Barely enough to fill a cupboard and too few to make it even to the first round.
On Thursday morning, it appeared Stewart had realised this mistake as, just before he started his day job duties of departmental questions, he had tweeted: “Now in the House of Commons chamber. Come challenge and ask questions.”
Surely this was his moment to make a pitch to undecided Tory MPs? Only it wasn’t. Because he appeared to believe that the MPs he most needed to win over were those on the opposition benches.
Lib Dem Jo Swinson kicked things off by asking about the relationship between international development and the climate emergency. Stewart looked her straight in the eyes. No one was more aware of the need to do more than he was. So much so that it was his intention to double the amount being spent on the climate and the environment. Swinson looked somewhat non-plussed. She had been under the impression Stewart was trying to be Tory leader, but now it looked as if he had switched sides and was staking a claim to the job she was after. The leadership of the Lib Dems.
She hissed a quick “hands off, pal” before following up with a question on subsidies on fossil fuels. Again, Stewart couldn’t have been more accommodating. The government had been hopelessly complacent in this area and Swinson was quite right to point out the contradictions. He was doing everything he could to put things right, but she had to understand that he was limited by the constraints of his ministerial role. He sat down to several loud cheers from the opposition benches.
Having successfully alienated everyone on the Tory benches who would happily destroy the planet for the prospect of a few more years in power, Stewart went fully kamikaze. When the Tory Brexiter Tom Pursglove asked him to set out why the customs union was the wrong policy choice, Stewart told him to get lost. What was most important was that the UK should have zero tariffs and zero quotas access to the EU market.
And another thing ... while he was about it, he wanted to repeat his conviction that any no-deal Brexit would be suicidal for the UK economy. Thereby wrecking not just his leadership aspirations, but any hopes he might have had of ever serving in the next prime minister’s cabinet. That kind of talk will cost lives under a new regime.
Yet by the end of the session, Stewart was all smiles. There was a certain freedom in having been true to himself. Hell, maybe he was a Lib Dem after all. He’d been through worse. Besides, being Rory looked a lot more fun than being Boris, Michael, Jeremy or Psycho Dom. At least he didn’t have any lies to remember and could sleep easy at night. Sweet dreams were made of this.
