Rory Stewart: ‘I assumed I’d die a heroic death in my early 30s’

Rory Stewart was born in January 1973 in Hong Kong. He was the Conservative member of parliament for Penrith and The Border between 2010 and 2019. He was the UK secretary of state for international development until resigning when Boris Johnson became leader of the part and prime minister. He has also been a member of the National Security Council, minister of state for Africa, Middle East and Asia, minister of state for prisons and probations, minister for the environment and chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. He founded and ran the Turquoise Mountain foundation in Afghanistan.

He is the co-presenter of one of the UK’s leading podcast, The Rest is Politics, has written five books, including three international bestsellers, presented three BBC television documentaries, and written numerous articles in journals including the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his work in Iraq, 

Speaking to The Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Rory Stewart considers the effect of his schooling, his relationship with his parents and what his 16-year-old self would think of his career.

I went to boarding school at eight. My parents were in Malaysia and Hong Kong, so they were 10,000 miles away. It probably made me who I am now. Whether it’s a good thing in the world? I’m not sure. But it provided me this incredibly intense opportunity of education.

You develop a real sense of a different type of identity because you’re spending all your time with other boys your age. There are no women there. No parents. 

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My younger self was very driven, very self-conscious. I passionately wanted to live a life on a very grand scale. I was obsessed with huge figures. So Tolstoy as a novelist. Wittgenstein as a philosopher. Alexander the Great as a general. Lawrence of Arabia as an explorer, a freedom fighter. Charles Darwin as a scientist. 

Somehow I thought I could be all those things. I wanted to change the world. I assumed I’d die a heroic death in my early 30s. 

I would do very weird things. I knew that Lawrence of Arabia would go days without eating, so I’d try to go without eating. I’d meditate. I’d try to sleep outside in the cold. I’d try to see if I could walk very long distances. 

I loved martial arts. I was at a karate course in Japan with a guy called Bear Grylls. He’s now become
a kind of TV celebrity. He was 15. I was 16. And we went off with older guys to compete against Japanese universities and study in a training camp in northern Japan.

I wrote really earnest long poems. At 16, I fell very much in love with a woman in Dorset. I went for a walk at night, looking at cows and wrote a very unsuccessful poem, a lot of which was about looking at cows. I realise now that cows are not a very romantic subject.

My fundamental concern, as a 16-year-old, was just how much adults give up, compromise and
sell out. My 16-year-old self would say to me now, “Rory – this is not good enough. Your books never
really became great books. Your politics in the end was too cowardly. You didn’t really stretch for what
you could have done.”

I should never have taken a job as a Harvard professor.I got flattered into jobs which I didn’t do well and didn’t really believe in, just because they sounded important. I began doing things I wasn’t really proud of, for money. My 16-year-old self would have wanted me to explore being a monk.

I think my 16-year-old self might question why I left the charity in Afghanistan [the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a charity focused on the enhancement of the Afghan craft industry, where Rory Stewart was CEO until 2010]. I loved that community. Maybe if I had stuck with that, I could have made a really wonderful life by focusing on a much smaller scale. 

Living in a military camp was very easy for me, because I’d been at boarding school. I think my ability to walk across Asia for 21 months [in 2000, Stewart took leave from the Foreign Office to walk across Iran, Pakistan, the Indian and Nepali Himalayas and Afghanistan] and not feel lonely – all this stuff, I’m sure was a great help. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a psychologically healthy individual. So it depends what you’re trying to create. If you want to create a little person who was able to walk across Afghanistan, or feel comfortable in their late 20s running a province in Iraq – probably these boarding schools are the way to do it, and I guess that’s what they were designed for. 

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My father was 50 when I was born, so he was somebody who fought in the Second World War and was a D-Day veteran. My father’s now died. He’d been a colonial officer in the British Empire. He was part of a very different universe. He was a spymaster. He ended up number two in the British Secret Intelligence Service. He was bewildered when I wanted to be a politician because he thought politics was a terrible job. He didn’t really understand being a writer because he didn’t have the kind of mind or the patience to put much thought or energy into writing stuff. But he was wonderful. I think he genuinely communicated to me. He enjoyed watching me do these things. He was impressed and interested and surprised and intrigued by these things I was doing, rather than trying to force me into following his path.

I need to remember to keep telling my mother, who’s still alive, how much I love her. And understand that my relationship with her is different. My father was a great anecdotalist and storyteller. I could recite the whole chronology of his life and his views on almost everything. My mother – that’s not true. She’s a very graceful, generous, easy person but, boy, does she not tell you much about the details of her past. Looking forward, I’d want to tell her that I adore her, without fully ever understanding her. She loves me and she was a great mother. But I have no ability to write a biography of her. Or fully explain her.

I think the 16-year-old me would be pleased that I didn’t put up with compromising with Boris Johnson and that I left the Conservative Party. I didn’t get behind a man who I thought would be a bad prime minister, or get behind Brexit, which I thought would be bad and harmful. 

I’d tell my younger self that the scariest thing is not people shooting at you. Death isn’t very scary. Failure, humiliation, shame is scary. What shadows you in life is the possibility of shame, the loss of honour. If I was given a chance in my 20s to take a bullet in some heroic way, I would have died very happy. Pushing on, well beyond your early 30s into being an adult with all the failures and compromises,
and all the people that you let down. As a politician, the mockery, the insults – some of it justified – thrown at you day in, day out. Having to see yourself – brutally, again and again – through the lens of people saying, “This guy’s weird.” “This guy’s a narcissist.” “This guy’s a hypocrite.” “This guy’s privileged.” “This guy’s a fraud.” “This guy’s pretentious.” These things are much more tough than somebody shooting at you. 

The biggest shame I carry is the way that I treated two girlfriends in my life. So I’d tell my younger self, be very, very, very careful with other people. Looking back, I can see that I was profoundly selfish, egotistical, imposing. I took them for granted. I wasn’t careful enough or respectful enough towards them. I was too much about me. It was too much about being the hero, living this epic life and changing the world. It wasn’t enough about really stopping and trying to listen and give space, proper space, to other people. 

A lot of that, I was taught by Shoshana, my wife. She took this strange person in his mid-30s and sat with me quite patiently, and began to teach me how to actually be in a relationship properly. Through her incredible forbearance and patience and trust – and that sense that, in the end, she believed I was a good guy – she transformed me.

Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart is out now in paperback (Vintage, £10.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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