Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders by Rory Stewart review: 'thoughtful writing from a maverick MP'
Composed during his time as MP for Penrith and the Border from 2010-2019, these essays by Rory Stewart are full of intelligence and panache, writes David Robinson
In Politics on the Edge, his bestselling 2023 account of a decade in politics in the Cameron-May-Johnson era, Rory Stewart explained how unlikely it was that someone like him would ever be selected in a safe Conservative seat. Mavericks don’t normally make the grade: the old party hands want to pick someone like themselves - long-serving county councillors perhaps, or well-respected local farmers, or candidates who have put up a good show despite losing in seats they never seriously expected to win.
In 2010, though, Cameron changed the rules. After the expenses scandal tarnished the Tory brand, a wider range of new candidates was allowed through, and the party's constituency selection process opened up so it was more like a US primary, and as long as you were a registered voter, you didn’t even need to be a party member.
It was a one-off, but at least it meant that from 2010-19, Penrith and the Border had a maverick MP: not just the kind of man who walked 6,000 miles from Iran to Nepal but also could write about it - or, it seems, almost anything else - with intelligence and panache.
That last point is probably the only reason that anyone would want to read a book that is essentially an edited selection of fortnightly columns in a local paper - the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald - which are already long out of date. And yet oddly enough - even for those of us who don’t know the wild fells round Alston or the tourist-free countryside around Longtown as well as we should - they stand up surprisingly well.
The constituency - when Stewart was its MP, the largest and most sparsely populated in England - doesn’t exist any more, and it had always been represented by MPs from Scottish families, most famous of these being Willie Whitelaw, Margaret Thatcher’s deputy prime minister. Yet while Stewart immediately felt at home amongst its people “with whom I spent the most stimulating decade of my life”, the workload of its MP had grown considerably. While Whitelaw received about 100 letters a year from his constituents, in that time Stewart would find himself dealing with 20,000 of their emails.
Mercifully, his book doesn’t drag us into those particular thickets, though a number of themes emerge which affect the way he thinks about politics. For one thing, in Stewart’s slice of Cumbria there clearly is such a thing as society: in 2010 it had the only community-run snowplough and ambulance in the UK, far more community fire engines, broadband initiatives and hospitals than anywhere else in the country and more common land - 200,000 acres of it. At Crosby Ravenscroft, villagers not only kept the pub from closing but borrowed over £1 million from a charity bank and built 22 houses that locals could afford to rent.
Backing such projects and local campaigns makes Stewart sound like a poster boy for Cameron’s Big Society ideas - and certainly he retains a healthy suspicion of “we know best” officialdom. But being an MP is, he says, an impossible job, even without those 20,000 annual emails. It’s a job that comes with no real power, though everyone thinks otherwise, and he has no budgets of his own to push through change, but rather has to work within the limits of ones set by distant others.
Maybe, he says, this was also the case for the first politician in Penrith’s history - a certain Flavius Martius, whose funerary inscription marks him out as a councillor in a pro-Roman Cumbrian Iron Age tribe. “Did Flavius,” asks Stewart, “reconcile himself to the daily disappointments, the small humiliations, the public contempt?”
That, I should point out, was one column Stewart didn’t send off to his local newspaper. There are also four other completely unrelated essays, including an exquisite one about meeting war correspondent Marie Colvin in Tripoli. But no matter how thoughtful his columns are about the threats to Cumbria’s economy and landscape, it’s that quote about Flavius that lingers longest in the mind.
Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders, by Rory Stewart, Jonathan Cape, £22
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