Is Being a Politician the Worst Job in the World?

This episode examines the intricacies and hardships of a political career, especially through the experiences of Rory Stewart, a former British politician.

1. Rory Stewart describes the political career as fraught with challenges and often soul-destroying compromises.
2. Brexit is discussed as a monumental error, with long-lasting negative consequences for the UK.
3. The episode explores the peculiarities of the UK's political system, including the strategy behind calling elections.
4. There is a detailed examination of the personal and professional costs of political life.
5. Stewart's reflections provide a raw look at the emotional and ethical tolls that politics can exact on individuals.

1: Opening Remarks

David Remnick introduces the episode and guest Rory Stewart, setting the stage for a discussion on the pitfalls of political life. David Remnick: "This is the political scene. And I'm David Remnick."

2: The Life of a Politician

Rory Stewart discusses the inherent difficulties of the political career, emphasizing the high stakes and moral complexities. Rory Stewart: "Brexit is disaster."

3: The Brexit Conundrum

The chapter delves into the ongoing repercussions of Brexit, Stewart's opposition to it, and its impact on British politics. Rory Stewart: "Brexit was catastrophic."

4: Election Strategies and Political Missteps

Stewart and Remnick discuss strategic decisions in political careers, including the surprising call for elections by political leaders. Rory Stewart: "My best guess is that he's basically given up and just wants to walk away."

5: The Personal Cost of Politics

Stewart shares personal anecdotes that reveal the deep personal costs of being in politics. Rory Stewart: "I begin by sticking up my principles and rebelling against the government."

1. Stay informed: Understand the real-life implications of political decisions and their impact on society.
2. Engage critically: Evaluate politicians' decisions critically, looking beyond the surface.
3. Advocate for transparency: Push for clearer motivations and more honest disclosures in politics.
4. Support mental health: Recognize and support the mental health challenges faced by those in leadership roles.
5. Encourage ethical leadership: Promote and support leaders who demonstrate ethical behavior and integrity.

On July 4th—while the U.S. celebrates its break from Britain—voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls and, according to all predictions, oust the current government. The Conservative Party has been in power for fourteen years, presiding over serious economic decline and widespread discontent. The narrow, contentious referendum to break away from the European Union, sixty per cent of Britons now think, was a mistake. Yet the Labour Party shows no inclination to reverse or even mitigate Brexit. If the Conservatives have destroyed their reputation, why won’t Labour move boldly to change the direction of the U.K.? Is the U.K. hopeless? David Remnick is joined by Rory Stewart, who spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and now co-hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” He left the government prior to Brexit and wrote his best-selling memoir, “How Not to Be a Politician,” which pulls no punches in describing the soul-crushing sham of serving in office. “It’s not impostor syndrome,” Stewart tells Remnick. “You are literally an impostor, and 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.”

People

Rory Stewart, David Remnick

Companies

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Books

"How Not to Be a Politician" by Rory Stewart

Guest Name(s):

Rory Stewart

Content Warnings:

None

David Remnick
This is the political scene. And I'm David Remnick.

On the 4 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, theyre 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 its been a disaster in soccer terms, an own goal on a historic scale.

Rory Stewart
The economy has sort of flatlined basically since 2010. Brexit is disaster.

We've staggered out of COVID and Ukraine war. The health service is in bits, the education's in bits, and everybody is genuinely fed up.

David Remnick
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.

Rory, the prime minister of Britain, Rishi Sunak, has called an election which is 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 Yereishi Sunak, why would you call an election if your party is almost bound to lose?

Rory Stewart
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, maybe 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 Roshi Sunek'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. 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.

David Remnick
So what's the alternative explanation? He's tired of the job.

Rory Stewart
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, Mary Le Pens party, has taken twice the number of votes that he's done. And he's responded by triggering an election for the National assembly.

David Remnick
Also possibly a Thelma and Louise solution.

Rory Stewart
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.

David Remnick
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.

Rory Stewart
Joe Biden seems to be in the latter category.

David Remnick
That's possible too. Where does Sunak fall?

Rory Stewart
No, no, I think Sunak will never tell us.

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 just wipe 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 is the relentless fundraising.

And remember, thats a pretty soul destroying activity. Its not just the time. Its 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, anybodys sane told that theyre going to be taking over a budget of a trillion dollars, be responsible for 70 million people, and running 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.

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 friends of his will say this, he's somebody who's been won at everything in his life. He was 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, reach 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, conservatives have 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.

David Remnick
Tell listeners that you became a conservative, you left and became an independent.

Rory Stewart
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 weve had home secretaries from minority ethnic backgrounds, a foreign secretary who was black, a prime minister whos a Hindu, etc, etc, etcetera. I mean, its 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 vanguards 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.

David Remnick
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.

Rory Stewart
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.

David Remnick
So Sunak's opponent in this, the presumed next prime minister, is Keir Starmer as the head of the Labour party. Rory, what is starmers strategy?

Rory Stewart
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 at the top. You got to be in parliament before you're 35 and people like Rishi Sunak and David Cameron become prime ministers.

Tony Blair, you know, when they're in.

David Remnick
Their early forties, we like them over 75.

Rory Stewart
You go for the gerontocracy instead.

David Remnick
Yeah, exactly.

Rory Stewart
So Kirstammer 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 tool maker. So he comes from a working class background.

He controversially cozied up to Jeremy Corbyn, who was this sort of radical 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 the leadership again by appealing to the party left, 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 pounds a year on green initiatives and that's now been abandoned.

He hasn't. He's drops all his opposition to conservative policies on welfare, tax, etcetera.

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 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.

David Remnick
Yeah.

So is there any chance in the world that he can screw it up?

Rory Stewart
I think it's going to be very difficult.

David Remnick
So in other words, if a cardboard box was the head of the Labour party, it would win?

Rory Stewart
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 for the election. And it's fine.

David Remnick
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?

Rory Stewart
David, that is a piece of american rhetoric that I don't understand. What is, what shoe is dropping?

David Remnick
The other shoe drops.

Rory Stewart
No, you have to really reframe it in another way.

David Remnick
For me, disaster has come.

The ultimate conclusion of the story has occurred. The other shoe has dropped.

Rory Stewart
So your question is, what's the narrative of this tragedy?

David Remnick
There you go. You're good at this.

Rory Stewart
So I think the.

But basically 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, personalist 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 werent kind of careful with your money. So the Conservatives were supposed to be the kind of boring, dignified, slightly stiff, fiscally prudent.

If they were being pompous, theyd sort of present themselves the kind of grown ups in the room.

And the Boris Johnson Liz Trust 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, this trust, she succeeded in announcing a mini budget that terrified the markets, was completely unfunded, and led to a immediate collapse in the currency rise in interest rates, and the next government had to come and reverse everything she did.

And this is very personal for me. Ive written a book called how not to be a politician, which is trying to look at how this happened. So I was there for 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 centre ground.

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 census. Now, slightly different was part of, forgive.

David Remnick
Me for interrupting, was part of the act of taking leave of one's senses. Brexit itself?

Rory Stewart
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, youve chosen to leave, but well go for a soft Brexit. Well try to remain very close to the European Union, politically and economically, well 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 centre ground, it instead decided to lurch for ever harder versions of Brexit under Boris Johnson, essentially saying, we want no more relationship with Europe than we have with Thailand.

David, 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.

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.

David Remnick
Rejoining is out of the question.

Rory Stewart
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 sama is he's unnecessarily ruled out even the intermediate steps. He's ruled out single market customs union.

David Remnick
What's the degree to which the population feels, you know what? This was a colossal mistake that we must undo.

Rory Stewart
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.

David Remnick
What's been the statistical and spiritual result of Brexit now that it's pretty entrenched.

Rory Stewart
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 polarization in society between people who voted Remain and people who voted Brexit. In 2016, 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 centre 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 favour of balancing the budget, but also in favour 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.

David Remnick
Rory, now, what is the Labour party and its standard bear, Keir Starmer, offering in place of the Conservatives? It seems pretty clear that theyre going to win. And youre going to have a new prime minister. Whats the program?

Rory Stewart
Well, this is the problem. I mean, you basically can't put a cigarette paper between them. The center 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 ratio GDP within five years. Labour's 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 labor has ruled out kind of austerity and briefly cutting spending.

David Remnick
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?

Rory Stewart
The fundamental problem is that the british economy hasn't grown.

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 in this election. And indeed, even in 2010 to eleven, 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 cost of public services in Britain are soaring through the roof. Our NHS, which we're very proud of.

David Remnick
That'S the National Health Service, yes, is.

Rory Stewart
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 three 4% above inflation.

Fundamentally, our country is getting older, 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 laborer, 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. There are other things we can talk about. We can talk.

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.

David Remnick
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?

Rory Stewart
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 an election, you face a wall of problems.

David Remnick
Rory Stewart is a former member of parliament, and he co hosts the podcast. The rest is politics. We'll continue in a moment.

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 best seller 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.

Rory Stewart
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, a careerism, sabbiness, 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.

David Remnick
Give me an example.

Rory Stewart
One example is that I begin by sticking up 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 going out trying to fundraise from people that I often despise, signalling that I might be agreeing with them when I really don't agree with them. I mean, 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 nuance, 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.

David Remnick
You see any exceptions in your experience in parliament or on american shores or elsewhere?

Rory Stewart
Yeah, I mean, 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 Gork, 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.

David Remnick
But you're saying you didn't. You didn't keep yourself intact.

What was the worst thing you felt you did?

Rory Stewart
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 I would feel totally fraudulent, as though I was a kind of cheap magician at conning the public and if you had prevailed, if you.

David Remnick
Had won, would you have ever come to this realization?

Rory Stewart
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 been acutely conscious of it. 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.

David Remnick
Do you suppose that politicians of the past, the statesmen of the past that you admire, suffered from the same sense of self doubt and even self loathing?

Rory Stewart
Well, Lincoln, I imagine, did.

Gladstone certainly did. Churchill was wrecked by bouts of profound depression.

David Remnick
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, have you gotten some pushback and is it also self cancelling about your future?

Rory Stewart
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, huh, honestly, why we all feel like frauds and why we all feel that it's degrading us and you feel like frauds.

David Remnick
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.

Rory Stewart
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 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, its a game that shes played since she was a student. So its very much about the party and she just wants to be famous.

Theres 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 on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were always told its the politicians whove made the decision. So maybe if Im 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 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 managing things, I like managing people, I like making decisions.

But of course, all of this is concealed. And 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 theres 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?

Ive said Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security. Ive spent $1 trillion here. Ive lost all these lives. Can I now say, maybe I got that wrong, maybe it isn't an existential threat to global security?

David Remnick
Would you ever re enter politics?

Rory Stewart
It's so difficult.

David Remnick
Let the record show a pained expression has come over your face.

Rory Stewart
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 it gives you long life.

David Remnick
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?

Rory Stewart
We're now moving into difficult ground, David, because I was there. 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.

David Remnick
Oh, I'm not going to let you go on that. 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.

Rory Stewart
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.

David Remnick
In a moment, I'll talk movies, very bad movies, in fact, the very worst movies, with comedian Paul Scheer.

Rory Stewart
From PRX.