These days Stewart leads a non-profit organisation that gives cash handouts to the poor of East Africa, and, with Alastair Campbell, co-hosts every centrist dad’s favourite podcast, The Rest is Politics. He has also, however, found time to write this memoir, Politics on the Edge: the story of his 10 years as a Tory MP. It’s very good. Even so, I’m not sure I should recommend it. This is because it casts such a depressing light on Westminster that it may put the reader off voting ever again. Uncompromising, candid and darkly humorous, this is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life; a new classic of political memoir and a remarkable portrait of our age. From the former Conservative Cabinet minister and co-presenter of 2022’s breakout hit podcast The Rest is Politics, a searing insider’s account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament Yet Stewart emerges from the carnage a stronger character. He realises that up against the aggressive exaggeration of the European Research Group, his allies on the Tory benches are “like a book club going to a Millwall game”. It doesn’t make him any less intense and he still takes himself far too seriously, but the prisons job and defending what he (and I) saw as a reasonable solution to a 52-48 referendum result ends his “queasiness about confrontational politics”. May goes. Stewart’s wife thinks he should stand for leader.

And a party that seeks to take down May rather than endorse her apparently ingenious Brexit deal completely confounds those who self-style as cool-headed rationalists. In short, the problem – as diagnosed by May and Stewart – is not in fact anything to do with the institutional “abuse of power” or the systematic eschewal of expertise. No, their problem is that the Conservative party does not specifically reward people like them.He did it best as prisons minister, inheriting a situation where 85,000 convicts were being jammed into 65,000 prison places and where, perversely, a third of prison officers had been sacrificed to austerity. Violence was rife, fuelled by drugs. He knew that access to them was 30 times higher in jails here than in Sweden. With support from his boss, David Gauke, he drew up a programme to fix the broken windows through which drone-delivered drugs arrived regularly, installing scanners, improving search procedures and setting clearer standards. Another unusual aspect is that Stewart often declines to mention names, thus suggesting a veneer of discretion, but gives you enough hints that anyone with access to a search engine or Wikipedia could probably work out who he is referring to. This faux anonymity is a bit annoying, as it doesn’t seem to achieve anything, and anyone who Stewart despises gets named repeatedly (primarily Boris Johnson). It was too late. With May’s subsequent resignation, the way was open for Johnson to succeed her. Desperate to stop him, Stewart sought a One Nation Tory who might defeat him. Failing, he stood himself. After the first television debate, he became, for many, the favourite to battle it out with Johnson, only to have his chances blown away in that fateful second. Later, for opposing Johnson’s Brexit deal, he, with others, was expelled from the Conservative Party, and left Parliament.

The book is in all fact an entertaining, insightful, timely, refreshingly honest romp through the British political swamp, offering up a tantalisingly clear view of the author’s unnerving time as a British MP. From beginning to end the reader is astonished that the author lasted as long as he did in a career field that seems not only not to value the qualities of honesty, integrity, truthfulness, any kind of loyalty or work ethic but essentially finds these qualities abhorrent to its mechanical day to day functioning. That does not mean he is always an excellent administrator or that I would believe he was a great minister - a lot of the initiatives he was pursuing seemed quite random an unstructured. But he cared and wanted to actually do things well, even through he was also changed by the system’s pressure to create own projects that would push one’s career up.This political memoir is sui generis. Even the title betrays the contradictions of the work: Stewart is at once "on the edge" and "within". Rory Stewart has always made a virtue of his vulnerable transparency. He once asked a Financial Times profiler "do you think I should be prime minister?", and, while he is often consciously self-mythologising, he never recites false myth. Where, for example, Boris Johnson slaves to belie his true self, Rory Stewart slaves to announce his (or at least, his own conception of it). This makes the book utterly revealing and at times unsettling, and there are two narratives which both reveal and unsettle within. The book has several moments of self-contempt. At one point Stewart thought about killing himself. He brooded in the middle of the night and often experienced disgust. Politics, he came to think, was a “rebarbative profession”. “In London, I felt increasingly exhausted and ashamed,” he admits. He developed migraines and kept going by taking painkillers. Despite all this, his idealism and love of country – his stated reason for joining the Tories – never quite left him. If it was the kind of open primary that saw Stewart adopted as a parliamentary candidate, he’d have walked it. But it wasn’t, and even if he’d made it through to the final two, the withered husk of the Tory membership was always going to vote for Johnson. In the end Stewart was expelled from the party, along with Churchill’s grandson, two ex-chancellors and six other former cabinet ministers. One of the gems of this memoir is the individual recorded conversations. A sample is Truss’s greeting of Stewart: “The problem with you, Rory, is you try to be interesting in Parliament and the media. Never be interesting.” Long passages in this chapter advocate for all the merits of the agreement – its sensitivity to Ireland, its best-of-both-worlds problem-solving. I find it convincing now as I found it convincing then. But her abject failure to interrogate, deeply, why Remainers and Leavers alike didn’t see promise in her arrangement is telling. She thinks they crashed her deal just “because they could” without considering that anyone might have good reason to.