Rory stewart

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Don’t expect to hear anything about Islamic State during the election campaign

Granted, you don’t really expect foreign policy to feature much in an election campaign – we’re not saints – but it’s still shaming the way that the biggest foreign policy issue simply doesn’t register on the radar right now. I refer obviously to Islamic State, the group that just keeps on giving when it comes to reasons to want them wiped out. It’s a toss up really whether you go for the recently exhumed mass graves of the soldiers they massacred in Tikrit, the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp they seized control of, the images they obligingly posted of themselves smashing artefacts at Hatra or the blowing up an Assyrian church over

Monday

Isabel Hardman

The issue of the defence budget could force more Tory MPs to become rebels

One of the really striking claims that Ed Balls made in his speech today was that the Tories would end up cutting more from the defence budget than Labour. This is not the sort of thing that you’d expect to hear: Labour saying it would end up spending more on defence than the traditional party of the armed forces. The Shadow Chancellor said: ‘First of all, our cuts, in any part of public spending, are not going to go nowhere near the huge scale of defence cuts you are going to see under the Conservatives on the basis of these plans.’ Balls also said that it was ‘absolutely impossible on

Monday

Steerpike

Is there anything Rory Stewart can’t do?

Having walked across Afghanistan, governed a province of Iraq and written award winning books about his adventures, now Rory Stewart has delivered his own son: ‘Penrith and the Border MP Rory Stewart has announced the birth of his first son – which he ended up delivering himself on the bathroom floor. Alexander Wolf Stewart was born at 5.30am last Wednesday. A press statement said he arrived so quickly that Mr Stewart had to deliver him before a midwife could arrive. It added: ‘The birth went very well and the baby and his mother, Shoshana, are very well. We are so so immensely happy and proud. It is such a happy

Thursday

David Blackburn

Is NATO a busted flush?

Rory Stewart is no soft-touch. When he was elected chairman of the Defence Select Committee, it was thought that he would hold the government and NATO’s feet to the fire. And so it has come to pass. The committee has published an alarming report on NATO’s unpreparedness to meet a threat from Russia. It says, in terms, that the risk of Russia attacking a NATO member, either conventionally or asymmetrically, is ‘small’ but ‘significant’. NATO has inadequate rapid reaction forces, cyber defence and strategic plans to counter this risk. The report also makes a telling political point: the public might no longer support NATO’s defining principle that an attack on

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Rory Stewart elected Chairman of the Defence Select Committee

Rory Stewart, the colourful and interesting Tory MP, has been elected as chairman of the Defence Select Committee. Stewart is a formidable appointment. He is knowledgeable on defence and foreign policy matters: having served as a diplomat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written widely of his experience and insights, and has taught related subjects at Harvard University. He is well-regarded by serving soldiers, many of whom speak highly of his views on counter-insurgency and the work of his charity Turquoise Mountain Foundation. He has, however, taken his head ‘out of the mountains’ of Afghanistan – and sees that security threats have taken new forms, such as cyber security, human

Monday

Steerpike

Tory MPs develop new Eton game

Tory MPs from less privileged backgrounds than their leader have developed a fun new game to play in the members’ tea room: drawing up definitive rankings of Polite Old Etonians and Rude Old Etonians. I hear that the polite list includes Jesse Norman, Zac Goldsmith and Jacob Rees Mogg, while the rude list features not only the PM but his chief whip Sir George Young, who is accused of ‘arrogance’. Apparently Sir George doesn’t say hello to people in the corridor. Keen bean Rory Stewart is also on the rude list: ‘People don’t mind ambition in parliament, but vaulting Shakespearean ambition is a bit of a turn off,’ whispers one

Thursday

Peter Jones

Sorry, Rory Stewart, but you don’t understand the Greeks

In last week’s Spectator, Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith, was reported to be proposing that we should create in Britain ‘1,000 little city states, and give power right down to all the bright, energetic people everywhere who just feel superfluous’. What did they teach him at Eton? The ancient Greek city-state (polis, source of our ‘politics’, etc.) was certainly ‘little’. There were at any one time about 1,000 of them dotted round the Mediterranean, most consisting of a city plus its surrounding countryside; and because of the nature of the terrain and the limited resources it could command, the average polis was c. 5,000 strong. The explanation of Athens’ power

Thursday

Peter Mckay

Peter McKay’s diary: The Old Etonian David Cameron should have been

David Cameron gives Old Etonians a bad name. Critics deplore his Old Etonian-ness,  his Lord Snooty Factor.  Childish, but it’s an uncomplicated prejudice which can be freely expressed in our otherwise rigidly policed public discourse.  Is there an OE who might rescue the school’s reputation? There is:  Rory Stewart, 40, Tory MP for Penrith.  Known in some quarters as ‘Florence of Belgravia’ because of his expertise in Arabic affairs, he is famous for walking 6,000 miles through Afghanistan in two years and for writing two bestselling books about working there and Iraq. And, says the Guardian – of all papers – he is ‘hugely appealing: self-deprecating, funny, open, curious and

Thursday

Toby Young

The new generation of Tory rebels

There’s a new member of The Spectator family, and she’s called Spectator Life. This is our new quarterly magazine focusing all the more civilised aspects of life — the arts, culture, travel, etc — and it comes bundled in, for free, with the main magazine. The first issue is available on newsstands this week, but, so you can try before you buy, here is one of its more political articles: an overview of the new generation of Tory rebels, by Toby Young. The Unwhippables, Toby Young, Spectator Life, Spring 2012 On the night of the great Tory rebellion over Europe, David Cameron had good reason to think that Zac Goldsmith

Tuesday

Alex Massie

No More Heaves in Helmand

Rory Stewart’s article on Afghanistan, published in yesterday’s Evening Standard, makes a succinct case for speeding up the west’s withdrawal from Helmand and the Hindu Kush. As he says, We are not obliged to stay till the last day. Did our mission go wrong because Nato had too few troops; or because it sent too many? Could a different strategy have fixed the situation; or was it always impossible? The reason no longer matters. Whatever the explanation, things will not improve: Nato will not “solve the relationship with Pakistan”; it will never create “an effective, credible, legitimate Afghan government”; and in most parts of the country it has already lost

Thursday

The Spectator

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Risky Business

The Spectator and KPMG hosted a conference recently that explored possible investment opportunities in today’s fragile geo-political climate. Panellists included Sir Malcolm Rifkind, John Ruffer, Lord Guthrie, Frank Gardner and Rory Stewart. CoffeeHousers can read James Forsyth’s magazine review of the debate here.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

The small society

No one, especially me, has comprehended the Big Society in its entirety. As far as I can gather, the state will shed some of its bureaucratic armour, but there is no clue as to where it will be dispensed. Writing in today’s Times, Rory Stewart, whose constituency contains one of the ‘Vanguard Communities; attempts a definition. He writes: ‘It is about decentralisation, but without giving more power to county councils. It is not necessarily about charities or even the private sector. It’s about collective action.’ Collective action already exists in Britain. People group together to re-paint the Village Hall; they organise a school run; they teach knitting to the inmates

Saturday

David Blackburn

Unwinnable war?

Today is Armed Forces Day, and I don’t recall seeing such collective negativity from newspapers and broadcasters on the Afghan war.  It borders on despair. Most news outlets have dissected David Cameron’s comments yesterday, where he could only offer the hope that troops would be withdrawn by the end of this parliament. Cameron’s non-committal answers, the regular drip of casualties and the sense that the surge has become a slog have led journalists and analysts to conclude, en masse, that the war is unwinnable.   Three interviews are particularly striking. Nick Harvey, the armed forces minister, re-iterated Cameron’s comments in the exact same terms. As I argued yesterday, the vague

Sunday

David Blackburn

Tory wars are history

In lighter moments, Gordon Brown is alleged to imagine that he is John Major and David Cameron is Neil Kinnock. Now, I think the Tories will win outright, but would Cameron resign if Brown’s daydreams became reality? ‘No,’ Cameron tells the Mail on Sunday. Despite the bravado, Cameron must fear a challenge hot on the heels of failure – emasculated backbenchers have threatened as much in private recently. By reputation, Tories romance in intrigue and excel at regicide; yet few credible usurpers exist. William Hague’s low campaign profile denotes spent ambition as much as it does proximity to Lord Ashcroft.  Liam Fox is admirable but has never commanded sufficient support

Sunday

Alex Massie

Rory Stewart’s Long March to the Border

It’s a curious feature of British politics these days that an ex-army, ex-FCO hand educated at Eton and Oxford can reasonably considered a “new” kind of politician. Then again, Rory Stewart isn’t your average Old Etonian. Assuming, as seems likely, he wins Penrith and the Border he seems likely to be the new member of parliament who will be the subject of more envy and perhaps jealousy than any of his peers. So be it. I rather enjoyed his account, published in the Sunday Times today, of the walking tour he’s made of his prospective constituency. There’s much good sense in it and, frankly, one approves of the idea of

Saturday

Alex Massie

Rory Stewart & Mr Micawber in Afghanistan

From an interesting Jason Zengerle piece in the New Republic: And yet, for all his obvious ambition, Stewart believes the key to any successful U.S. policy in Afghanistan is modesty. “What muddling through is really about is recognizing that we don’t have all the answers,” he says. “It’s not as if we have some amazing high modernist ideology that we’re kind of engineers of the human soul or central planners who are going to come out and create an ideal state. We don’t have that ideological certainty, we don’t know what we’re trying to do, nor do we actually have the power. We don’t have the kind of authoritarian weight

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Was Rory Stewart an MI6 Officer?

Was Rory Stewart, Harvard Professor, author of The Places In Between and prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for the Bracknell constituency, an MI6 officer? Former-ambassador-turned-conspiracist Craig Murray says he was: One person I would not vote for is the crusading neo-Conservative Rory Stewart. It is particularly annoying that he is constantly referred to as a former diplomat. Stewart was an MI6 officer and not a member of the FCO. Three years ago I received a message from the FCO asking me not to mention this as, at that time, Stewart was still very active for MI6 in Afghanistan and his life could have been endangered. I agreed, and even removed a