The former Tory MP’s fascinating insider account of the Cameron-May-Johnson premierships offers a scathing portrait of our political system

Political memoirs don’t always age well. Getting the juice on the big beasts of Westminster can be tantalising until a changing of the guard occurs and those big beasts disappear from public life. But Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge digs deeper than most. As well as a fascinating insider account of the Cameron-May-Johnson premierships, it is a scathing portrait of our flawed political system and a “rebarbative profession” that, despite Stewart’s appetite for public service, chewed him up and spat him out.

Luckily, he is nothing if not adaptable: born in Hong Kong, Stewart is a former soldier who worked for the diplomatic service in Indonesia, as an administrator in postwar Iraq, who taught human rights at Harvard and led a charitable foundation in Afghanistan. When he entered parliament in 2010, he made a maiden speech in which he unwisely compared himself to Scott of the Antarctic, after which he worked variously in environmental and rural affairs, international development and prisons. After a failed bid to become Conservative party leader, he finally stood down as an MP in 2019.