Rory Stewart’s Next Great Adventure / Telegraph Magazine

 I last interviewed Rory Stewart a year ago at Wormwood Scrubs. He was Prisons Minister. He arrived in a suit, tie and official Jaguar. This time we meet in south London’s Brixton Market. He comes by Tube, shorn of his ministerial entourage, wearing jeans, open-necked shirt and raincoat.

Much has happened to this 46-year-old maverick in the intervening period. Six months ago he was promoted to the Cabinet as International Development Secretary, and within days had joined the race to succeed Theresa May as Tory party leader.

Three months ago he resigned from the Cabinet because he felt unable to serve under the winner, Boris Johnson. Two months ago he was expelled from the Conservative parliamentary party for opposing a no-deal Brexit. A month ago, he announced he was quitting Parliament altogether, and would take the bold and characteristically quixotic step of contesting next May’s election for Mayor of London as an independent.

Brad Pitt must be kicking himself. In 2008 the actor bought the film rights to Stewart’s extraordinary career as a soldier, diplomat, adventurer, provincial administrator in Iraq, charity chief in Afghanistan, bestselling author and Harvard academic. But he let the option lapse after Stewart was elected to  Parliament in 2010. ‘He calculated that politicians are rather less interesting than whatever I was before,’ Stewart chuckles.

As part of his mayoral campaign he now plans to walk through every one of London’s 32 boroughs, talking and listening to ordinary people, which is why he is in Brixton. It is improbable territory for a recent Conservative minister, but Stewart has no airs and graces. He does not patronise. He seems genuinely interested in what his interlocutors have to say.

He chats to Afghan stallholders in fluent Dari – one of his 11 languages. He commiserates with a halal butcher whose rent is soaring because of gentrification. He joshes with the ladies in a hair-extension shop, poses for numerous selfies, and exhibits a politician’s talent for remembering names and faces. Even when we finally sit down to talk in a Trinidadian restaurant called Fish, Wings & Tings he keeps breaking off to greet people.

Stewart caused a stir at the start of his mayoral campaign by revealing on Channel 4 News that he prefers Pret a Manger to ‘boozers’. Here he orders a curious combination of puri and sugar as he tells me how angered and saddened he was by his expulsion from the parliamentary party, and particularly by the ‘brutal’ way he was informed by text just minutes before winning GQ magazine’s Politician of the Year award. Twenty other moderate Tory MPs were expelled with him. ‘Boris was purging a whole faction of the party. It felt like the Bolsheviks throwing out the Mensheviks,’ he says. He went walking in America with his wife, Shoshana, to calm down.

He decided to leave the party after watching Johnson’s defiant response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that his prorogation of Parliament was unlawful. ‘I felt I can’t take this any more,’ he recalls. ‘It was not just his tone. It was seeing over 100 of my colleagues applauding when the Supreme Court had just ruled 11-0 against the Prime Minister. I sat for two-and-a-half hours on the backbenches feeling completely alienated.’

Stewart does not conceal his distaste for Johnson. ‘He’s not my type of person,’ he says. ‘We’re complete chalk and cheese…I’m suspicious of the whole show. I instinctively don’t like the evasions, the equivocations, the jokes, the punchiness, the lack  of earnestness.’

He was a junior Foreign Office minister when his fellow Old Etonian was Foreign Secretary and it was a ‘disaster’, he says. ‘He always makes me feel like the boring one having to say “Have you done this?” and “How is this going to work?”’ He calls himself the ‘anti-Boris’.

But Stewart now feels perversely grateful towards his nemesis. ‘What’s driving me is an enormous sense of relief at leaving the Commons, leaving the Conservative Party, and having something practical and concrete to get my hands around,’ he says. ‘In an odd way I owe Boris a debt of gratitude. Had he left me in the party I’d have been gently languishing on the backbenches for the next five years.’

Johnson’s opponents encouraged Stewart to run against him in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Prime Minister has a majority of just 5,000. ‘It sounds like a dramatic idea,’ says Stewart. ‘But when I reflected on it, it didn’t seem to me like a serious thing. You would be a sort of kamikaze bomber who would probably take him out but not win the seat.’

Nor did Stewart want to remain an MP. ‘It’s a ridiculous job,’ he says. ‘It’s deeply dishonest towards your constituents. You give the impression through your literature that you have power when you don’t. If you get into government you’re whipped on every vote, and clearly if you rebel you’re out. You’re putting out literature talking about local issues because that’s what people care about, but your ability to influence those things is very indirect. You’re giving speeches that nobody except your mother listens to.’

Stewart admits that he would rather go to a Pret a Manger than a pub CREDIT: LUKE STEPHENSON

Being a minister was little better. ‘As Environment Minister I fought very hard to try and introduce ultra-low-emission zones but was blocked by the Treasury. I tried to set more ambitious standards for cars and was blocked by pressure from the automobile industry. I tried to achieve bans on plastic coffee cups and was blocked by Number 10,’ he complains as he unwittingly sips tea from a disposable cup. ‘I was able to introduce a plastic-bag tax, but in the end it was me signing a piece of paper when seven or eight years of previous ministers had tried to do it and I was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.’

And so, after rejecting two teaching offers from US universities, he hit on the idea of running for mayor. It was an impulsive decision. He consulted only Shoshana and two other close associates. The prospect really excites him. He is a doer, an administrator. He loves ‘fixing things’. The post would give him real power to help people, and to improve the capital’s transport, housing, environment and policing. ‘If I’m lucky enough to win I’ll have four to eight years to really make this city better,’ he says.

The job also offers the chance to do what he has been striving to do all his life – to make a mark, to distinguish himself, and ‘in a small way change the world’.

Stewart was born in 1973, the son of a larger-than-life Scot who joined the D-Day landings, became a colonial civil servant and top MI6 officer, then ran the Rubber Growers Association in Malaya before moving to Hong Kong. Stewart admired and adored him. 

He spent the first few years of his life in South Kensington. Early each morning his father would teach him martial arts and fencing in Hyde Park. They would go for long walks from the family seat, Broich House in Perthshire, and later raft down Malayan rivers. Stewart was sent home to board at the Dragon School. ‘He was a remarkable boy, lots of talents, very charismatic. He always loved doing daring things,’ recalls Felix Martin, a contemporary who became a lifelong friend.

He then went to Eton, where Johnson had been a pupil nearly a decade earlier. The differences between the two boys were readily apparent. Johnson’s housemaster lamented his ‘disgracefully cavalier attitude’ and belief that he ‘should be free from the network of obligation that binds everyone else’. Stewart was serious, high-minded, and such a favourite of the provost, Eric Anderson, that he persuaded the Prince of Wales to employ him as a summer tutor for William and Harry.

Johnson and Stewart both went on to Balliol College, Oxford.  Johnson joined the elitist Bullingdon Club. Stewart resigned in disgust after one meeting. ‘I was completely horrified by those people. They seemed so rude, so arrogant. They were standing on tables in the Kings Arms pub in Oxford shouting at people, even as 18-year-olds.’

Stewart was hardly a strait-laced student, though. Martin remembers returning to their shared digs one evening to find blood spattered across the walls – ‘a shocking scene’. Stewart had tried to impress friends by uncorking a champagne bottle with a sword, and shattered it, then insisted on having his hand stitched up without an anaesthetic.

Thereafter Johnson embarked on a gilded career as a metropolitan journalist and politician, while Stewart spent the next dozen years pursuing his dream of becoming an exotic adventurer like his idol, TE Lawrence. It was a quest to prove himself, to show heroism. He had spent a gap year with his father’s old regiment, the Black Watch, but has told The New Yorker magazine it felt like ‘rehearsing for a play that’s never going to be put on’.

After graduating he worked in the British embassy in Jakarta, then in Montenegro following the Kosovo war. He denies he was a spy, like his father, but admits that he could not say so even if he was.

He spent 21 months walking 6,000 miles from Turkey to Nepal, sleeping each night on villagers’ floors – ‘He kept on talking about this and we all thought it was a load of nonsense, but he did it,’ says Martin. In 2002 he walked across Taliban-infested Afghanistan, surviving bandits, landmines, illness and snowstorms.

Stewart with his wife Shoshana earlier this year CREDIT: ROB PINNEY/LNP

It was an extraordinarily courageous (and reckless) exploit that he turned into a bestselling book, The Places  in Between. Following the US invasion of Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority appointed him deputy governor of two volatile southern provinces. He negotiated with tribal chiefs, survived a siege, wrote another bestseller and earned an OBE.

Prince Charles then persuaded him to set up a charity, Turquoise Mountain, to restore historic buildings and revive traditional crafts in Kabul. It now has a £5.2 million annual budget, and 193 employees in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Stewart’s adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq allayed what he now calls his ‘very grandiose ideas of what I wanted to be’ – his romantic notions of Lawrentian heroism. They also shaped his political outlook. Day after day he encountered real people in real places with real problems, and realised that those foreigners governing them from distant capitals lived in a parallel universe.

It was ‘a complete revelation… I suddenly realised everything we were talking about, all the state-building theory, all the intervention theory, was surreally, absurdly, grotesquely detached from what was happening on the ground.’ The officials and policymakers used bland, abstract jargon that had ‘cracked adrift from reality’. And ‘once I saw that I saw it again and again – not just in Afghanistan but in Britain’.

In 2008 Stewart, by then an acclaimed author who had become a stern critic of US and British policies in Afghanistan, became a Harvard professor. But within a year the MPs’ expenses scandal broke and David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, threw the Conservative parliamentary candidate list open to untainted outsiders.

Stewart applied, though he had been a teenage member of the Labour Party and had never voted Conservative. He denies he joined the wrong party. ‘I’m in many ways a Conservative,’ he says, citing his belief in tradition, the monarchy, the military, limited government and restraint.

He was duly selected for Penrith and The Border, campaigned by walking the length and breadth of the constituency, and won a handsome majority in 2010. His future looked assured. He had a safe seat and an impressive backstory. He had made a lot of money from his Afghanistan book, and was set to inherit his parents’ South Kensington house and 100-acre Scottish estate.

In 2012 he married Shoshana, a former physics teacher from upstate New York who had volunteered to work for Turquoise Mountain in Kabul and now runs it. ‘We were amazed he managed to find such a lovely and impressive woman,’ Martin laughs. Stewart was late for our meeting in Brixton because he had just come from his wife’s ‘rather lovely’ citizenship ceremony in Kensington and Chelsea. ‘The people getting citizenship at the same time were a Romanian, a Syrian, a Turk, a Spaniard, a Mongolian, a Yemeni, an Indian and a German – all of them swearing allegiance to the Queen,’ he says.

They have two boys – Sasha, four, whom he delivered on the floor of his remote Penrith cottage when Shoshana went into premature labour, and Ivo, two. Stewart proudly shows me a photo of his kilted sons. ‘Each morning I walk my little boy from the same house to the same school that my father walked me to 40 years ago,’ he says with evident pleasure. He even teaches him martial arts in Hyde Park.

But only Stewart’s 16 months as Prisons Minister gave him any professional fulfilment as a politician. Unlike most of his predecessors, he spent many days meeting prison officers, talking to prisoners, trying to understand the problems bedevilling the prison service. He pledged to resign if he had not reduced violence in the 10 worst prisons within a year. He was promoted to the Cabinet before the year was up, but violence had begun to decrease in seven of those prisons.

‘I was very sceptical about his 10 prisons and promise to resign, but the thing I regret most is that Rory is not Prisons Minister any more,’ Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, told me.

Though he voted Remain, Stewart championed Theresa May’s ‘Chequers deal’ until Brexit destroyed her premiership. In the subsequent leadership contest he was the sole moderate and deplored his rivals’ support for a no-deal Brexit. He went walking again to drum up public support, posting videos of his encounters on social media. ‘I needed to convince the party membership that if we wanted to win a majority they needed a candidate in the centre ground.’

Stewart did surprisingly well. He reached the third ballot, and was arguably the only candidate to emerge with his reputation enhanced. But he could not serve under Johnson. He regards the Prime Minister as a gambler who, at Dominic Cummings’ behest, is courting the reactionary Right at the expense of more traditional, moderate Tory supporters – and who will consequently be in hock to his new backers. As a traditional ‘One Nation’ Conservative, Stewart now says he feels ‘politically homeless’.

Stewart is unrepentant about stating his preference for Pret a Manger. ‘I’ve had lunch from Pret two days a week for the last four years. I genuinely believe in being honest rather than sending a signal,’ he says. 

By the same token he does not want to list his three priorities for London, or reduce his campaign message to a bumper sticker (when pressed, he reluctantly suggests: ‘Independent. I am. Are you?’).

‘I’m trying very gently to push back against bland political platitudes,’ he explains. 

Stewart certainly needs to run an unorthodox campaign, for he faces a formidable task. Last week he was accused of racism after describing three men he met in a leadership campaign video as ‘minor gangsters’. Sadiq Khan is the Remain-supporting Labour incumbent in a Remain-supporting Labour-leaning city. Stewart’s private polling puts Khan’s support at just under 50 per cent, himself on 22.

In order to win, Stewart needs to emulate Emmanuel Macron, who won the French presidency in 2017 by quitting François Hollande’s government to run as a young, energetic insurgent offering a fresh start. He wants to fill the ‘gaping hole in the centre’ created by the extremism of the two main parties, and believes ‘there’s an enormous appetite for the centre ground. It’s just that nobody’s standing for it. Nobody is trying.’

He is the most colourful candidate. He has name recognition. His launch video was viewed a million times on Twitter. He was heartened to receive 800 supportive emails and £18,000 in donations within three days of announcing his candidacy. He says his smartphone is a ‘secret weapon’ that he can use to exploit social media and get a bandwagon rolling.

The mayoral electoral system may also actually help Stewart. He does not initially have to beat Khan outright. If he can win enough votes from young professionals and disaffected Tories to come second and deny Khan an outright majority, then the other candidates are eliminated and their supporters’ second-preference votes are added to the count. He could realistically hope to be the second choice of most of Bailey’s supporters, and of some Liberal Democrats.

Were he to win, Stewart would again be following in Johnson’s footsteps. Would he, too, seek to use City Hall as a route to Downing Street?

‘The notion of doing what Boris did, which is go back into Parliament and try to run for leader of the Conservative Party fills me with horror,’ he replies.

So is this tireless seeker of fulfilment renouncing all prime ministerial ambition?

‘I think so, yes. I think what I’m saying is that I would like to have “Mayor of London” on my tombstone, not “Prime Minister”.’