The conversation with writer, podcaster and former Conservative Party MP Rory Stewart starts in his London sittingroom and ends outside his children’s school gate, frequently veering into the poetry of William Butler Yeats along the way.
The Irish poet has lessons for today’s politics, especially his 1919 poem The Second Coming, written after the first World War as the War of Independence in Ireland was about to get under way.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats wrote.
The poem reflects Stewart’s current mood, though a man who solo walked across Afghanistan, ran a province in Iraq after the 2003 invasion and adores the bleakness of Cumbria’s moors is, perhaps, one never known for an excess of jollity.
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“One of the questions is, why was Yeats able to spot this odd paradox – the fact that politicians appear to lack conviction, and because they lack conviction, they aren’t really able to communicate, to create a narrative or a story that moves people,” he says.
Stewart, who will be in Dublin on Tuesday for solicitors Matheson’s 200th anniversary celebrations, has been thinking a lot about the future of politics and society, and the forecasting of such change ever since Donald Trump was returned to the White House.
Like others, Stewart’s predictions of a Kamala Harris victory were off the mark. Analysing where he went wrong, he tells The Irish Times: “I managed to convince myself that [she] would win.
“I realised in retrospect this was partly because everybody kept saying: ‘You’re being so gloomy, you’re being so negative, give us some optimism,’” says the former British cabinet minister.
“I began to weave together a story of a kind of liberal centrist fight back to do with the midterm elections in the US and to do with what had happened in Poland, and goodness knows what else.
“If I’d actually held my nerve, I would have stuck to my basic analysis, which is that a combination of social media, the 2008 financial crisis, the catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China has dealt body blows to the liberal order,” he adds.
That analysis is almost unremittingly pessimistic, one where democratic politicians fail to explain complicated messages in the face of virulent populism to a public that has been anaesthetised by social media.
“It means I’m very worried. I’m very worried about whether any of us in Europe have the skills or resources to make the arguments for things that I think matter ethically,” says the fast-walking Stewart.
“We live in a world which is all about speed and productivity and efficiency and the next thing. It’s not a culture that particularly favours careful checks, or reading something carefully.
“You glimpse something for a second on your phone on a bus, or in the toilet, that appears funny or provocative or confirms some theory that you’ve got, and you share it before you flush the toilet, and then you’re on to your next,” he says.
And it is not just the public that are guilty. Politicians and commentators are too often sinners, as well: “We’re in a world in which we want to be quick, to be relevant, to be first to get the tweet out,” he says, sighing deeply.
For Stewart, the British-Irish relationship is, or should be, Whitehall’s central relationship, with the UK’s only land border and with linguistic and social connections ‘unlike those that exist anywhere else in Europe’
Unlike some, Stewart can all too easily imagine a world where Westminster politics is upended after the next House of Commons elections in a way that will threaten long-fixed constitutional boundaries.
“A lot can happen in four years, and Nigel Farage is perfectly capable of blowing himself up, et cetera. But there is a very significant chance that Farage could replace the Conservative Party as the big party in British politics alongside Labour.
“This has happened before. It happened with the Liberal Party after the first World War where Labour ate it in a single election, and the Liberals never came back.”
Such an outcome, if it led to the Reform party being in power, threatens the very existence of the United Kingdom – where separatist hopes in Scotland and unification hopes among nationalists in Northern Ireland would be rocket-fuelled.
“It would be completely devastating. And then the more existential question for that voter who might like Farage is, do they care enough about the continued existence of the United Kingdom?” he goes on.
Stewart is a committed unionist, but he feels increasingly surrounded by others who are not interested in the UK’s survival, or who do not care sufficiently either way to prevent its break-up.
His experience during the 2014 Scotland independence referendum campaign lives with him: “I found there were many, many people in England, including many of my MP colleagues, who didn’t care about keeping Scotland in the United Kingdom.
“They felt no emotional resonance to it, they thought their lives would be simpler if the UK was smaller. They knew nothing about it,” he says, before veering again towards Yeats’s description of those lacking convictions.
“There’s an asymmetry here. Passionate nationalists have a rich and well-developed story developed over decades about what independence would be like, against a unionist side that is often lukewarm, indifferent, that doesn’t really have a narrative.”
Stewart knows that the debate about unionism differs throughout the UK, especially in Northern Ireland, where unionists have a completely different identity and range of historical reference than unionists elsewhere in UK.
If most people living in the UK know far too little about the constituent parts of their own union, they know little, if anything at all about its nearest neighbour, Ireland, one that is, nevertheless, bound by ties of geography, blood and history.
In the past, too many in Britain looked down on Ireland. Today, the situation is, perhaps, even worse: “It’s become almost more insulting. It’s gone from a patronising assertion of superiority to complete ignorance and indifference.
“In a sense, it’s easier to handle a former colonial oppressor who is trying to belittle your claims, but to have somebody essentially say, ‘Well, we don’t really care that much and we’re not that interested’, is almost more offensive given the history,” he says.
British prime minister Keir Starmer, even if Stewart finds him dull and lacking leadership on other issues, has worked hard to reset the dial on the British-Irish relations that were so badly damaged, especially during the reign in 10 Downing Street of Boris Johnson, he says.
For Stewart, the British-Irish relationship is, or should be, Whitehall’s central relationship, with the UK’s only land border and with linguistic and social connections “unlike those that exist anywhere else in Europe”.
Stewart, once a Remainer, will always be a Remainer.
Ireland is the UK’s “only connection back to the European Union” for what should be the UK’s “big strategic plan” over the next 20 years to reintegrate much more closely with Europe in terms of economics, defence and security.
