Rory Stewart
Roderick James Nugent "Rory" Stewart is a British academic, broadcaster, writer, and former diplomat and politician. He teaches and co-directs the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Since 2022, Stewart has co-hosted the podcast The Rest Is Politics with Alastair Campbell. Stewart served as a British Member of Parliament between 2010 and 2019, and in the British government, between 2015 and 2019.
Born in British Hong Kong, Stewart attended the Dragon School and Eton College. After a brief period of military service in the Black Watch, Stewart studied philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating he joined the Foreign Office, holding diplomatic positions in Indonesia and Montenegro. He left the Foreign Office to undertake a solo walk across Asia, which later became the subject of his best-selling book The Places in Between. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Stewart was involved in the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Maysan province. He founded and ran the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, an NGO focused on human development in Afghanistan, before becoming a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. He joined the Conservative Party in 2009.
Stewart served as Member of Parliament for Penrith and The Border between 2010 and 2019, representing the Conservative Party. In 2014 he was elected chair of the Defence Select Committee. He served under David Cameron as Minister for the Environment from 2015 to 2016. He was a minister throughout Theresa May's government: as Minister of State for International Development, Africa, and Prisons. He joined the Cabinet and National Security Council as Secretary of State for International Development.
After May resigned, Stewart stood as a candidate to be Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 2019 leadership contest. His campaign was defined by unorthodox use of social media and opposition to a no-deal Brexit. He stated at the beginning of his campaign that he would not serve under Boris Johnson. When Johnson became prime minister in July 2019, Stewart resigned from the cabinet. In September 2019, Stewart had the Conservative Whip removed after voting to delay the UK's exit from the European Union. In October 2019, Stewart resigned from the Conservative Party and stood down as an MP at the 2019 general election. He announced he would stand as an independent in the London mayoral election, but withdrew in May 2020 on the grounds of it being postponed to 2021 due to the COVID pandemic.
Stewart was the president of GiveDirectly from 2022 to 2023 and a visiting fellow at Yale Jackson from 2020 to 2022. In 2023 he published a memoir, Politics on the Edge.
Early life and education
Roderick James Nugent Stewart was born in 1973 in Hong Kong, then under British rule, the son of Brian Stewart and his wife, Sally Elizabeth Acland Nugent. His family is from Broich House, near Crieff in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Stewart's father was a colonial official and diplomat who, in the 1970s, was reportedly a candidate to become the Chief of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service or MI6. Stewart's maternal grandfather was Jewish. His younger sister has Down syndrome.Stewart spent his early years in South Kensington, London, before his family moved to Malaysia and then back to Hong Kong. He returned to Britain for boarding school from Malaysia at the age of 8, being educated at the Dragon School, in Oxford, and Eton College.
He was taught martial arts and fencing by his father in Hyde Park. As a teenager, he was a member of the Labour Party. During his gap year in 1991, he served a short service limited commission in the Black Watch for five months as second lieutenant on probation.
He read history at Balliol College, Oxford, before switching to philosophy, politics, and economics. While a student at Oxford, Stewart was a private tutor to Prince William and Prince Harry during the summer. He attended a single meeting of the Bullingdon Club before resigning after witnessing the behaviour of other members.
Diplomatic career
Indonesia and Montenegro
After graduating, Stewart joined the Foreign Office. He worked in the British embassy in Jakarta from 1997 to 1999. He was appointed in 1999 as the British Representative to Montenegro just after the Kosovo War.Some have suggested that Stewart was an employee of the Secret Intelligence Service during his time as a British Representative to Montenegro – allegedly being recruited to MI6 shortly after he graduated from the University of Oxford. Stewart has said that his career progression and his father's work for MI6 might "give the appearance" that he worked for MI6, but says he did not work for MI6 while a diplomat. Stewart has acknowledged that due to the Official Secrets Act, even if he had worked for MI6, he would not be able to admit it. A former aide to Seema Kennedy reported that, as an MP, Stewart climbed out of her fifth-floor window in the Norman Shaw Buildings to enter his locked office next door despite the outside wall being bare; "o this day I have no idea how he managed to do it".
Iraq
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Stewart was appointed as the Coalition Provisional Authority Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator in Maysan, a province of southern Iraq, in 2003. He was posted initially to the KOSB Battlegroup then to the Light Infantry. His responsibilities included holding elections, resolving tribal disputes, and implementing development projects. He faced growing unrest and an incipient civil war from his base in a Civil-Military Co-operation compound in Al Amarah, and in May 2004 was in command of his compound in Nasiriyah when it was besieged by Sadrist Movement militia. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services during this period. While Stewart initially supported the Iraq War, the international coalition's inability to achieve a more humane, prosperous state led him in retrospect to believe the invasion had been a mistake.Books and media
Travel and travel writing
In 2000, Stewart took leave from the Foreign Office to walk across Asia. This journey on foot involved Stewart walking for more than eighteen months, across much of Iran, Pakistan, and the Indian and Nepali Himalayas in 2000 and 2001, finishing with a 36-day solo walk across Afghanistan in the early months of 2002. He typically walked 20–25 miles a day, staying in village houses every night. He has also walked across sections of Western New Guinea and much of the United Kingdom. Stewart was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Livingstone medal in 2009 "in recognition of his work in Afghanistan and his travel writing, and for his distinguished contribution to geography". His subsequent travel in the United Kingdom, and his writing on geography, was recognised by the Royal Geographical Society, which awarded him the Ness Award in 2018.His book describing his walk across Afghanistan, The Places in Between, was a New York Times bestseller. The Places in Between was called a "flat-out masterpiece" by The New York Times. It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Spirit of Scotland award, and the Premio de Literatura de Viaje Caminos del Cid. It was short-listed for a Scottish Arts Council prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The book was adapted into a radio play by Benjamin Yeoh broadcast in 2007 on BBC Radio 4.
According to The Daily Telegraph, Brad Pitt bought the rights to make a film about Stewart in 2008, with Orlando Bloom tipped to play the leading role.
His book about his 1,000-mile walk in the borderlands separating England and Scotland, also known as the Scottish Marches – The Marches: Border Walks With My Father – became a Sunday Times top ten bestseller. The Marches was long-listed for the Orwell Prize, won the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year, and was a Waterstones Book of the Month.
He has also written about theory and practice of travel writings in prefaces to Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands, Charles Doughty's Arabia Deserta, and Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana.
Writing on politics and international affairs
Stewart's book The Prince of the Marshes: and other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq describes his reflections on the intervention in Iraq, based on his experiences as the Deputy Governorate Co-ordinator. The New York Times critic William Grimes commented that for him the "real value of the new book is Mr. Stewart's sobering picture of the difficulties involved in creating a coherent Iraqi state based on the rule of law". The book was the subject of a play at the Hampstead Theatre, written by Stephen Brown.Stewart's book on international intervention, Can Intervention Work?, co-authored with Gerald Knaus, was published by W. W. Norton as part of the Amnesty International Global Ethics Series in 2011. It distilled Stewart's reflections on the lessons of the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan for the practice of international intervention.
Stewart has written articles for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
In September 2023 his book Politics on the Edge was published by Jonathan Cape. A personal account of Stewart's years in politics, starting with his attempts to be selected as a Member of Parliament, it describes his experiences as an MP, as a junior and then a senior minister, and his Conservative leadership bid. It was an instant number one Sunday Times bestseller in the UK.
He was a columnist for The New York Times.
Television
In January 2010, Stewart presented the BBC Two documentary miniseries The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia.In 2012, he wrote and presented the BBC's Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart, a documentary in two parts telling the story of foreign intervention by Britain, Russia and the United States in Afghanistan from the 19th century to the present day, which aired on BBC Two and won a Scottish BAFTA.
In 2014, Stewart wrote and presented a two-part documentary on BBC Two about the cross-border history of what he called "Britain's lost middleland", covering the kingdoms of Northumbria and Strathclyde and the Debatable Lands of the Scottish Marches on the Anglo-Scottish border. Its full title was Border Country: The Story of Britain's Lost Middleland and it investigated the rift created by Hadrian's Wall and the issues of identity and culture in a region divided by the fabricated border.