How Not To Be A Politician: A Memoir

From a great writer legendary for his expeditions into some of the world’s most forbidding places, a wise, honest and sometimes absurdist memoir of a most remarkable journey through British politics at the breaking point Rory Stewart is famously intrepid. After a stint as a British diplomat, he first made his name in America with a memoir of his two-year walk across Iran, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, essentially solo, in the months after 9/11, and he went on to perform valiant public service in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. Settled afterward at an academic perch at Harvard, he quickly became restless. With scant hope of winning the primary, and no prior connection to politics, he stood for a seat in Parliament representing a rural district in Cumbria, the idyllic locale of the Lake District and also one of the poorest districts in England. He ran as a Conservative, though there was much about the party that he disagreed with, and vice versa. How Not to Be a Politician is a candid and penetrating examination of life on the ground as a politician in an age of shallow populism, when every hard problem has a solution that’s simple, appealing, and wrong. While marked by Stewart’s undaunted optimism about what a public servant can accomplish in the lives of his constituents, the book is also a pitiless insider’s exposé of the game of politics at the highest level, often shocking in its displays of rampant cynicism, ignorance, glibness, and sheer incompetence in the face of grave and complex challenges. Rory witnesses the emergence of a new age of populism as Britain votes to leave the European Union and splits into a political civil war, compounded by the bad faith of his party’s leaders—David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss. Finally, after nine years of service and six ministerial roles, and shocked by his party’s lurch to the populist right, Stewart run for Prime Minister. To the consternation of many fellow Conservatives, Rory’s campaign— driven by his fresh use of social media—took him into the lead in the opinion polls, head to head against Boris Johnson. The party deck was stacked against his brand of centrist politics, but it was a close-run thing. Now, How Not to Be a Politician is his effort to make sense of it all, including what has happened to our politics in Britain and the world and how we can fix it. The view into democracy’s dark heart is troubling, but at every turn, Stewart also finds allies, and ways to make a difference, whether the matter at hand is prisons or international aid or the everyday lives of the people in his district, a place full of good and decent people who are hard to pigeonhole. A bracing, invigorating mix of irony and love infuses How Not to Be a Politician. This is one of the most revealing memoirs written by a politician in living memory.

• | Author: Rory Stewart
• | Publisher: Penguin Press
• | Publication Date: Sep 19, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 464 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0593300327
• | ISBN-13: 9780593300329