Is Being a Politician the Worst Job in the World? 35:44

This is The Political Scene, and I'm David Remnick. On the 4th of July, while we're watching the parades and the fireworks and drinking a couple billion dollars worth of beer, over in the United Kingdom, citizens will go to the polls. And if predictions are correct, they're going to vote the current government out of power. The Conservative Party has run the UK for most of the past 14 years, an era of steep economic decline.

Four years after Britain left the EU, some of Brexit's biggest advocates acknowledge that it's been a disaster. In soccer terms, an own goal on a historic scale. The economy has sort of flatlined basically since 2010. Brexit's disaster. We've staggered out of COVID and Ukraine war. The health services are bits, the education's bits, and everybody is genuinely fed up.

Rory Stewart is uniquely placed to enlighten us about what's happened in Britain and what's about to happen. He spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and he quit the government before Brexit took place. Now Rory Stewart co-hosts The Rest Is Politics, one of the most popular podcasts in the UK.

Roy, the Prime Minister of Britain, Rishi Sunak, has called an election, which his party, the Conservatives, are expected to lose and maybe lose badly to the Labour Party. Everything about that sentence is completely confusing to an American. So we have elections at fixed times. Why does a Prime Minister call an election? And if you're Rishi Sunak, why would you call an election if your party is almost bound to lose? Well, good questions.

First on the constitutional point, in Britain, as in places like France, there are no fixed terms, although not effective fixed terms. And in Britain, formally what happens is you request that the king dissolves parliament. In this case, he needed to do it within five years. And people were expecting him to push it as long as possible, because as you say, he was a long way behind in the polls. The logic for pushing it long would be

maybe something would turn up, you know, maybe, you know, the Labour leader would slip on a banana skin, maybe the economy would turn a corner, who knows. Instead of which he did something that is not just for American and international listeners, but for British listeners completely incomprehensible, which is that he triggered an election when, as you say, he's been 20 points behind in the polls for a couple of years. And at the moment at which he triggered it, I'm a former member of parliament and cabinet minister, my phone was full of

current conservative members texting me, either saying I have literally no idea what he's doing or coming up with different kinds of theories. The formal answer, so to play Rishi Sunak's hand for him, that he gives is to say that he'd got some positive economic news, inflation was down, the economy was growing, and this was the moment to surprise the opposition by triggering an election when they weren't expecting it.

But it doesn't quite make sense because the positive economic news was very, very recent. You know, it had come in a couple of days before and certainly nobody has experienced it in their pocketbook. So if he had any confidence in the economic performance of his government, you would have thought he'd push it out six, nine months to see whether it was going to result in doing anything that anyone noticed. So what's the alternative explanation? He's tired of the job?

Yeah, that's my best guess. My best guess is that he's basically given up. And just wants to walk away. Well, it's a combination probably of two things. I think at a subconscious level, this is a bit, you know, it's going beyond my remit to get into analyzing his soul. But there's an odd combination of two things which I feel as a ex-politician or recovering politician often go together. A sense of despair.

and a pretense of boldness. So what he will be telling himself is that he's being radical, he's bold, he's taking a decision, he's taking the initiative. The other person who's just done this, as we're recording, is President Macron in France, who has just come out of a situation in which the far-right party, Marine Le Pen's party, has taken twice the number of votes that he's done. And he's responded by triggering an election.

for the National Assembly. Also possibly a Thelma and Louise type solution. Possibly, David. I think they've got a lot more in common, though. And again, you notice this very odd thing, which is that his prime minister begged him not to do it. His cabinet has totally thrown off balance. But essentially what I think is in common is that these are young men who...

in some strange isolated moment in their offices, decide they're going to be bold and radical. Maybe Thelma and Louise is the correct analogy. There are some politicians who you get the sense hate the job once they're in it. And then there are some politicians who cannot imagine life without it. Joe Biden seems to be in the latter category. That's possible too. Where does Sunak fall? No, no, I think Sunak will never tell us.

But my, and this may only because I hated the job. I may be reading too much into this, but my assumption is that he absolutely detests the job. Why would he detest it? Well, firstly, I think being a politician is a very miserable existence in any country. Some of it will be familiar to American listeners. So there's the relentless fundraising.

And remember, that's a pretty soul-destroying activity. It's not just the time, it's the kind of people you have to ring and the kind of promises you have to make to those people to get the money. The second thing is the impossibility of the job. I mean, obviously, anybody's sane, right?

told that they're going to be taking over a budget of a trillion dollars, be responsible for 70 million people and running, you know, 25 government departments that no human being could possibly get their head around, would say, please don't give me that job. That's ridiculous. I don't have that knowledge. I don't have that competence. So it's not imposter syndrome. You are literally an imposter. I mean, you're literally on television all the time claiming to understand things you don't understand and claiming to control things you don't control.

And then there's the brutality of social media, there is the treachery of your colleagues. And there is a sense if you're Rishi Sunak, that he is somebody who and this is maybe being a little unfair, but you know, friends of his will say this, he's somebody who's been a, you know, one at everything in his life. He was, you know, head boy of his school, got his first class degree at Oxford, went off to Stanford Business School, made a lot of money.

And this is the first thing he's ever failed at. It must feel very, very odd to have come in, reached this position and be 20 points behind in the polls. And he is very diligent. He sits at the cabinet table scrutinizing details and doing what he thinks the right thing. And the public don't like him. I mean, he's been in for 14 years. It is almost impossible to think of anything they've done.

anything they've achieved. Now, let me just put a brief pause in to defend my old party for a second. There's one thing that's... And we should tell listeners that you became a conservative, you left and became an independent. That's right. I became an independent and I ran against Boris Johnson. And when I failed to stop him becoming leader, I left. And in the conservatives' favor, I think one thing that has been interesting is it's a much, much more diverse parliament and cabinet than anything we've ever seen before.

You know, we have a situation in which we've had Home Secretaries from minority ethnic backgrounds, a Foreign Secretary who was black, a Prime Minister who's a Hindu, etc., etc., etc. I mean, it's been an incredibly interesting, diverse group, completely unimaginable in the Conservative Party 15 years ago. Unfortunately, a lot of these people from diverse minority ethnic backgrounds have turned out to be unbelievably right-wing, which is another strange thing, and I...

struggle to understand that and struggle to communicate it to my Yale students who naturally assume that if somebody comes from a poorer, diverse background, they're going to be progressive. Boy, is that not the case with the Conservative Party. How are the people that sort of more liberal, urban, Southern Britain, that constituency, are they feeling some sense of relief that the Labour Party is coming or...

I sense no excitement. I must tell you, I sense not a whit of excitement about this election any more than there's a whit of excitement about ours. They'll be very relieved the Conservatives are being booted out, but they are completely underwhelmed and sad about Labour because there's no optimism. There's no sense of the future. So Sunak's opponent in this, the presumed next prime minister, is Keir Starmer.

As the head of the Labour Party, Rory, what is Starmer's strategy? So Keir Starmer is a man who was a very senior lawyer in the British system. And he became a member of parliament at what in British terms is a pretty advanced age. I think he came in age of 55. The tradition in British politics is to make it the top. You've got to be in parliament before you're 35. And, you know, people like Rishi Sunak and David Cameron become prime ministers at

Tony Blair, you know, when they're in their early 40s. We like them over 75. You go for the gerontocracy instead, yeah. Exactly. So Keir Starmer comes in. He's only in 2015, so not very long ago. He is somebody who nobody knows very much about, apart from the fact he's meant to have been a good lawyer. His father, as he keeps reminding everybody, was a toolmaker, so he comes from a working class background. He controversially

cosied up to Jeremy Corbyn, who was this sort of radical kind of Bernie Sanders plus left-wing figure who took over the British Labour Party and became one of his cabinet ministers, which made him very unpopular with a lot of the moderate centre of the Labour Party. But of course it worked out for Starmer because it meant he was established, increased his national profile, and when Corbyn went, he was able to stand for leadership, stood for leadership, again by appealing to the party left-wing,

making a series of commitments, which as soon as he came in, in fine American primary fashion, he immediately reneged on and tacked back to the center. He's also backed off his big green promises. So he had an idea of spending £28 billion a year on green initiatives, and that's now been abandoned. He's dropped all his opposition to conservative policies on welfare, tax, etc.,

So if you're from the progressive left, you're thinking, for goodness sake, and above all, the most dramatic thing is people will be enraged that he is not prepared to do anything about the European Union. People like me say, okay, maybe we can't rejoin, but we could at least join the customs union. We could at least get much closer to Europe again. If you really want to turn around the British economy, let's some signal to get some business confidence.

And now he's been running a strategy, which is called a Ming vase strategy. So the idea is that you're carrying this very expensive piece of Chinese porcelain across a polished floor, and you just walk very, very slowly to get to the other side, and you take no risk at all. Yeah.

So is there any chance in the world that he can screw it up? I think it's going to be very difficult. In other words, if a cardboard box was the head of the Labour Party, it would win. Yes, provided the cardboard box was very disciplined about not letting a flap fall down or...

Not letting itself get stuck in the rain. I mean, the cardboard box basically just has to remain a cardboard box to the election and it's fine. It's been a long time since this party has been in office, 14 years. What shoe is dropping in Britain when it comes to the Conservative Party? David, that is a piece of American rhetoric I don't understand. What does what shoe is dropping mean? Oh, you know, the other shoe drops, you know, this expression. Yeah.

No, no, you have to reframe it in another way for me. Disaster has come. The ultimate conclusion of the story has occurred. The other shoe has dropped. So your question is, what's the narrative of this tragedy? There you go. You're good at this. So I think basically they lost, the Conservatives, my party, lost this election a long time ago.

And from my point of view, they lost the election when they voted for an incompetent, dishonest buffoon to be prime minister in the form of Boris Johnson. And then they doubly lost it when they brought in this imprudent, reckless, unqualified personless trust to be prime minister. And the reason those two things are important is that the brand of the Conservative Party in Britain

was always to suggest that Labour were kind of nice, liberal, compassionate people, but they weren't kind of careful with your money. So the Conservatives were supposed to be the kind of boring, dignified, slightly stiff, fiscally prudent. You know, if they were being pompous, they sort of present themselves as the kind of grown-ups in the room.

And the Boris Johnson Liz Truss choices destroyed those two things completely. They destroyed any sense of moral integrity or character by bringing in Boris Johnson and any sense of performance or ability or competence by bringing in this woman Liz Truss. She succeeded in announcing a mini budget that terrified the markets, was completely unfunded and led to an immediate collapse.

collapse in the currency rise in interest rates and and and The next government had to come in and reverse everything she did And and this is very personal for me I mean I've written a book called how not to be a politician which is trying to look at how this happened So I was there for kind of nine and a half years Watching the Conservative Party go from the party which I joined which was supposed to be a party of the center ground and

The majority of my colleagues believed in remaining in the European Union. And, of course, I left a party that had, as far as I was concerned, completely taken leave of its senses. Now, slightly different to what the Republic... Forgive me for interrupting. Was part of the act of taking leave of one's senses Brexit itself? Yes. I mean, Brexit was catastrophic because the Conservative Party responded to it by...

tracking ever further to the right. The referendum should never have happened. Obviously, I'm saying that with the benefit of hindsight, but it's clear, obviously, to everybody in Britain now that referenda are a very bad idea. We end up with very bad results. But even after it happened, it was a very narrow victory, 52% to leave, 48% to remain. And the natural response would have been to say, okay,

you've chosen to leave, but we'll go for a soft Brexit. We'll try to remain very close to the European Union politically and economically. We'll stay in a customs union or whatever. And what the Conservative Party did was instead of taking that opportunity of building bridges, working for the center ground, it instead decided to lurch for ever harder versions of Brexit under Boris Johnson. You know, essentially saying we want no more relationship with Europe than we have with Thailand.

David, I mean, you know, you'd also understand that it was a catastrophic geopolitical bet because a lot of it was about saying we're going to get much closer to fast growing economies like China. You know, Europe is stagnant. The European economies are doing poorly. So the big strategic bet is we'll ally ourselves with these kind of Asian economies that are growing at 8%.

totally failing to take into account the national security implications. Rejoining is out of the question. There is not a single party going to this election pushing for rejoining, partly because the referendum was such a bruising experience. But what's striking about Keir Starmer is he's unnecessarily ruled out even the intermediate steps. He's ruled out single market customs union. What's the degree to which the population feels, you know what, this was a colossal mistake that we must undo?

The majority of people now think it was a mistake, over 60%, which is what gives encouragement to people like me to say, why are these people not speaking about Brexit? The problem is the same polls suggest that far fewer people want to rerun the referendum. So I think their sense is this was a terrible mistake, but we don't want to go through this again. What's been the statistical and spiritual result of Brexit now that it's pretty entrenched?

So the economic impacts of Brexit are negative. They've been completely overshadowed by the economic impacts of COVID and the Ukraine-Russia war. The UK COVID response led to a recession, the largest recession in 300 years. The spiritual consequence, I think, is profound because it created incredible polarisation in society between people who voted Remain and people who voted Brexit in 2016-17.

50% of people who voted remain wouldn't contemplate their child marrying someone who voted for Brexit and vice versa. Destroyed, emptied out the center ground, provided the opportunity for Boris Johnson to essentially do a very familiar thing, which is to turn a center-right party, which was the party I joined. And this book is about, it's about how a

party that was socially liberal and fiscally conservative, in other words, so in favor of balancing the budget, but also in favor of gay marriage, for example, transformed itself into a party that became socially conservative, anti-immigration, fighting against transgender and stuff like that, on the one hand. And on the other hand, economically, was much more about borrowing money, spending large amounts of money, large social programs. And this was Boris Johnson's new coalition,

which allowed him to win a big election by bringing largely less educated working class older voters in the northeast of England who traditionally voted Labour over to the Conservatives because he was appealing to their socially conservative anti-immigrant views. That won him the 2019 election, but I think has destroyed the future of the Conservative Party.

Rory, now what is the Labour Party and its standard-bearer Keir Starmer offering in place of the Conservatives? It seems pretty clear that they're going to win and you're going to have a new Prime Minister. What's the program? Well, this is the problem. I mean, you basically can't put a cigarette paper between them. The centre of their strategy is to say that they're not going to deviate from the Conservatives' fiscal plans in any way. So the Conservatives say that they're going to reduce debt

as a ratio GDP within five years. Labour signed up the same thing. Both parties are going into this election profoundly dishonest, profoundly dishonest, because there's no way they can meet this fiscal target without either brutally cutting spending or raising taxes. And they've all ruled out raising taxes and Labour has ruled out kind of austerity and brutally cutting spending. So

Well, you've already had some ideology of austerity, which has taken a deep toll on your institutions, health care, police, roads, courts, youth services. They've all seen, unless I'm getting this wrong, seen some very wide and deep declines. Did the conservative government not foresee those consequences after years and years of cuts? Does the party regret it? The fundamental problem is that the British economy hasn't grown enough.

That's one problem. And the second problem is, unlike the United States, we don't have the... We're not the world's reserve currency, so we can't really borrow. The question of austerity is kind of playing around the edges. I mean, in this election, and indeed even in 2010-11, the gap between the Labour and the Conservative parties on these is tiny. And this is partly because Britain is very constrained. I mean, it's not...

In a position, the markets don't allow it to do what Joe Biden's done, which is borrow huge amounts of money to pursue big industrial strategies. So it's locked into a kind of this sort of neoliberal Reagan-Thatcher consensus, which is it's sort of locked into a world where there's a limit to how much it can borrow, how much deficit it can run.

At the same time, the costs of public services in Britain are soaring through the roof. Our NHS, which we're very proud of... That's the National Health Service. Yes, is completely free, totally free treatment to people of every sort, from the most minor ailment to the most advanced medical treatment. The result is that every year, spending on the NHS increases about 3-4% above inflation. Fundamentally, our country's getting older, and

Our welfare state is costing more and more. There's no appetite to actually reform these things from any of these parties. And we have become an economy almost entirely dependent on cheap migrant labor, which has now become politically controversial. So Britain took 700,000 people in this year, 700,000 people in last year. Now to put that in context, traditionally British governments would try to take in the tens of thousands. And

We seem to be stuck in a hole. I mean, there are other things we can talk about. People complain about the fact that we have a lot of science and innovation in Britain, good universities, but we never seem to be able to turn them into companies. And that's partly about the way that our financing system works. Basically, smart people at Oxford and Cambridge invent stuff, and then they head off to Silicon Valley to set up their companies. It does seem...

that it's been a very, very hard period for Britain. You're not alone in that, but it's been a very hard period for Britain. And it's a time that demands serious leadership. Do you think you'll get it? No, we won't get it, unfortunately, because one thing I've learned as a working politician is that parties that don't tell you

before an election what they're going to do, very rarely succeed in doing it after the election because you simply haven't built the support that you need. I mean, if you try to conceal your policies and then do something radical after election, you face a wall of problems. Rory Stewart is a former member of parliament and he co-hosts the podcast The Rest Is Politics. We'll continue in a moment.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I've been speaking with the English writer and politician Rory Stewart. Now, as a young man, Stewart was a diplomat, and then he was a kind of adventurer and travel writer. In fact, he spent 18 months walking across Asia, an experience that he turned into a book.

In 2010, he was elected to the British Parliament as a Conservative, a member of the Tory party, representing a rural district in the north of England. He served in Parliament for nine years, and he left just before Brexit took place. He then wrote a book about his time in government, and it's not the political memoir that we're accustomed to. It's not chatty. It's definitely not self-admiring.

Instead, it's a searing, even self-loathing account of how much he hated being a politician, how much he hated Parliament. The book is called How Not to Be a Politician, and it was a bestseller in Britain. You've written a book where you describe the soul-destroying aspects of being a politician. And I would imagine that a lot of people look at the evidence of what it is to be a politician and say, no, thank you.

I'd rather not. So David, I mean, this book is called How Not to Be a Politician, but it's really about the inside of what it's like. And I'm trying to be as brutally honest. I'm destroying my career in the process, but I'm trying to bring alive just how much incompetence, careerism, shabbiness, strange compromise, game playing, ignorance,

is implicit in me, right? The important thing is I'm not just chucking rocks at colleagues. I'm also trying to explain how my own character was deformed by the experience, how many things I did that I was profoundly ashamed of. You know, I would- Give me an example. One example is that I begin by sticking up for my principles and rebelling against the government. And then I'm told that I'm going to be

left on the back benches for five years and not made a minister. Within four years, I'm sending creepy texts to David Cameron congratulating him on speeches that I really didn't admire at all in order to try to get myself promoted. I begin voting for all the government legislation. And ultimately, when I'm running to be mayor of London, I'm, you know, going out trying to fundraise from people that I often despise, signaling that I might be agreeing with them when I really

Don't agree with them. I mean, it's, there's a lot of very, I felt that I was getting, that it was bad for my mind, my body and my soul. And I think we become in politics, cardboard cutouts. We cease to really, we lose humility. We lose humility.

We lose complexity. We lose critical thinking. There is a problem with structure, economic structures, constitutional structures, party structures, but there is also a problem of character. You see any exceptions in your experience in Parliament or on American shores or elsewhere? No.

Yeah, I mean, I... Let the record note there was a long pause. Long pause here. The problem is that the people that I can think of are not household names. There were definitely members of parliament. There was a guy called David Gauke, who was the Secretary of State for Justice, who remarkably was able to, I think, keep his soul intact.

make some pretty difficult decisions and remain a human being but but you're saying you're you you didn't you didn't keep I didn't know I felt what was the worst thing you felt you did I think I became vain insecure Obsessed with social media checking how many likes I get on Twitter. I would go out on stages I was running for leadership running to be Prime Minister and I would do these huge rallies and I would get enormous applause and

And I would feel totally fraudulent, as though I was a kind of cheap magician conning the public. If you had prevailed, if you had won, would you have ever come to this realization? I think it's a very good question, David. I mean, I think that I must have been conscious of some of these problems under the surface, and it probably would have made me a very, very unhappy prime minister. I probably would have in office said,

been acutely conscious of. But there's so many aspects. One aspect, David, is I was the foreign office minister, and I'm standing up in Parliament, and I'm expected to speak fluently about 43 countries in Africa. It's complete nonsense. And then I'm moved to run the entire prison system in England and Wales. I can visit half these prisons. And yet I'm supposed to be saying, this is what's happening in Liverpool prison, this is what's happening in Birmingham. And

When I'm standing up and saying the way to bring peace to Burundi is to respect the Arusha Accords, and I call on the previous prime minister of Tanzania, I don't even know where Arusha is. I don't know who the previous prime minister of Tanzania is. I don't know which countries have a land border with Burundi. Do you suppose the politicians of the past, the statesmen of the past that you admire, suffered from the same sense of

self-doubt and even self-loathing. Well, Lincoln, I imagine, did. Gladstone certainly did. Churchill was wrecked by bouts of profound oppression. What's been the reaction to your former colleagues in Parliament and elsewhere in the British political scene about letting the cat out of the bag in this book by being so blunt about

what it is to be a politician. Is it, have you gotten some pushback and is it also self-cancelling about your future? I've got some people very, very angry, understandably. And, but there are other colleagues who've written in to say that they found it very helpful, that they found parliament very depressing, that they struggled with mental health issues. And this is the first time they've seen somebody actually describe what

why we all feel like frauds and why we all feel that it's degrading us. You feel like frauds, but at the same time, there's the lure of power. Can you describe that? Because you wanted it. You wanted to be the head of the party. You would have liked to have been prime minister. You ran for parliament, obviously. Talk about the lust for power, the desire for power. Well, I think it's a mixture of different things. There is...

the sense of competition and game. So a lot of politicians, including me, went to kind of fancy schools and were tops of our class. So it's just an extension of, you know, being head of whatever club they were head of at Oxford University and now they're kind of showing off rights. I'm prime minister. So there's that bit of it. There's the Liz Truss approach to power, which is, it's a game that she's played since she was a student. It says very much about the party and she just

wants to be famous. There's the type of power that I told myself I was interested in. I mean, I told myself that what I wanted to do is stop things like the Iraq and Afghan wars happening again, and that if I could get my hands on the lever of power, because I, you know, on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're always told it's the politicians who've made the decision, you know, so maybe if I'm a politician, I can stop these decisions.

being made. And then I was a civil servant. I was a soldier, a civil servant. And I thought, you know, this is a way of being an administrator. Another type of liking power is the sense that I like running things. I like solving problems. I loved, you know, managing things. I like managing people. I like making decisions. But of course, all of this is concealed. Because what we say to the public is that

We're there to serve. We're there to make their lives better. But we're not spending much time thinking hard about the granular details, the nuances, the incongruities, the complexity of making their lives better. I remember Mitt Romney saying to me, I was teaching at Harvard, and he came to see me in 2009. And he said, you know, get all your thinking done now, because you're not going to be able to think when you're a politician. And I think that is true in American and British politics, that

There's very, very little space to really sit back and say, does this economic policy really work? And above all, most difficult thing of all, can I reverse? You know, I've said Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security. I've spent $1 trillion here. I've lost all these lives. Can I now say, maybe I got that wrong? Maybe it isn't an existential threat to global security. Would you ever reenter politics?

It's so difficult. Let the record show a pained expression has come over your face. It's very difficult because I feel deep, deep sense of obligation and responsibility and love of country and a belief that there are things that I do reasonably well. I think I was a reasonably good minister and I think I learned stuff. Ten years taught me a lot about government and how to run government. And I think if somebody...

Brought me in and gave me a department I'd probably do a better job this time than I did last time and I'd be very proud of it on the other hand It is the most unpleasant job I've ever had in my life and it's exhausting and it's terrible for your family and it's terrible for your character and It will drive you into an early grave unless you're an American politician in which case you you just gives you long life Rory Stewart, thank you so much very much

Rory Stewart is the co-host of The Rest is Politics. His memoir of serving in Parliament for nine years is called How Not to Be a Politician. Let's talk about something extremely important, the royal family. How do people take on the rift between Harry and William? We're now moving into difficult ground, David, because I was their tutor, I was their teacher, I was Prince Harry and Prince William's teacher, so I slightly stay off

getting into the detail of my students in this way. Oh, I'm not going to let you go on that. No, no, no, no. You're really going to say nothing about this on the basis of having taught them math 25 years ago. And being a friend of the Kings. I mean, I'm not an objective observer. I'm a passionate monarchist and a strong friend of the Kings. In a moment, I'll talk movies, very bad movies. In fact, the very worst movies with comedian Paul Scheer. I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour.

There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters. In print or here on the podcast, The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. From PR.