One of the oddest metrics of British political life is the concept of 

: the question of whether you’d go for a beer at the pub with your prospective Prime Minister or MP. It was a yard-stick sometimes held up against 

 and Keir Starmer in last year's general election – the sense that neither of them was necessarily Stella fodder; the feeling that each of them would be tough work in the smoking area. It is a gnawing concern. I have stood in a pub in Westminster and watched Matt Hancock, a pint of lager in his hand like an Oscar statuette, go on desperately about how he and most politicians were just “normal people”, which is not something, you’ll notice, that normal people often do. (A few days later he was in the jungle on 

, a show whose title alone slightly negated his central thesis.) Matt Hancock, per- haps, has another type of pintability, in that you wouldn’t mind pouring one over his head. Annoyingly, I think he’d actually like it.	

I do not really want normality or averageness in my politicians and leaders. I am mostly unmoved by their ability to correctly split open a pack of Scampi Fries for sharing. I think there is nothing sinister or off-putting about being exceptional or esoteric. I think oddness is probably close to greatness. I think slickness and smoothness are good attributes for marble countertops. They tend to be bad ones for brains.	

I would, as it happens, go for a pint with Rory Stewart. (As it was, we spoke over the phone while he navigated a cancelled flight at Edinburgh airport.) Is he classically pubbable? I do not know. He would not care. And I suspect it would be a grave misunderstanding of the current state of global politics to really worry.

It is a cliché to write about Stewart as ‘the man who would be PM’. There is a gathering idea that, in some sunnier parallel universe – one without the dead-eyed careerism of Liz Truss, Grant Shapps and 

 – he is our leader and saviour. The ‘would be’ here is the key thing. Stewart seems defined by his otherness, by his outsiderness, by his alternativeness. James Marriott of 

memorably described him as “the oddball messiah of the centrist tribe”, and it seems to me that the odd-ball part makes the messiah bit all the more compelling. A lasting image of Stewart came in 2019, as he watched his hopes for the Tory leadership fade before his eyes. Sitting on a stool on the debate stage, Stewart removed his tie in exasperation, or perhaps in last-ditch defiance of the fake formality that al- lowed his opponents – who seemed to lie wherever he told the truth – to glide on unruffled. They were the phoney, spotless swans; he was the earnestly beating legs. The collar sat skew-whiff, as on a schoolboy after a moderately gruelling exam.	

Stewart describes Westminster as almost like “an odd sort of school”, and there is something permanently school-boyish about him in the way that the endlessly energetic always feel young. This is different to the second cliché levelled at him, which is to say that he is a man ‘born out of time’, perhaps – a politician who would have fitted in more smoothly among the rhetorical riches of Gladstone or even Cicero. But he is a romantic, I think, not a classicist: a man who is interested in living a novelistic life – picaresque but with a purpose – chapter by chapter. The walk across Afghanistan. The short-service commission in the Black Watch. The diplomatic career. The private tutoring of William and Harry. The academic posting at Yale. The outsider MP. The ministerial appointments. The reach for leadership. The London mayoral shot as an independent. Then the charity president – and now the podcaster supreme.

And next... Well, what? A public intellectual? A sort of elfin national treasure? A mirror-world leader? A Portillo-esque sofa presence? Or something else? The Labour party, Stewart rightly reckons, now has five short years to deal with several very big problems. After that, the public may well be wanting a proper look at someone else. We may by then have abandoned our concerns of pintability, or we may not. Another pretender to the Tory crown at that point seems likely enough to be Nigel Farage, the gouty High Priest of Pints. I remember Marina Hyde writing once that he couldn’t tell her what his favourite song was – a grinning hologram with zero hinterland or depth. Rory Stewart, who lugs cases and cases of books with him wherever he goes, seems a man of almost endless hinterland and colour and depth. I was struck to read, just before our interview, that he has been several times to a 10-day silent retreat. I think this is a much more interesting proxy for public office than any pub.

 Well, yes – this is something I’ve done three times. Ten days of silence. The retreats are very unusual. You’re not allowed writing material, you’re not allowed a book, you can’t meet anyone’s eyes. You’re meditating for two hours, then three hours, then four hours. I think that the business of not moving, of not fully thinking, or at least distancing yourself a bit from your thoughts, gives you a very unusual sense of your life and your death and all these kinds of things.

Each time has felt different. The first time, I had what felt like a very deep, almost religious experience. The last time, I had moments of feeling very bored, being very frustrated, and then moments of being intensely interested in the little glimpses of nature I got between my meditation.

 I’ve heard that people have auditory and even visual hallucinations when they lack any kind of stimulation for a prolonged period.

RS: Yeah, that’s very common. On the first time, I had an experience lying in bed at night of feeling a kind of electric charge moving up from my toes – up through my knees, through my hips, up to my head, and then down again. I was sort of almost juddering on the bed. And then it didn’t stop – it kept going for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, and I began to get a bit worried about what was going on. That’s the closest I’ve come to a strange hallucinatory experience.

Are you somebody who feels they’re very in touch with themselves and what motivates them?

 I’m trying to get in touch with it. I think my view at the moment is that we will always remain a mystery to ourselves, and that that’s probably quite important. I think it would probably be a bit terrifying to be completely transparent to ourselves or others. I was just reading this book by the new vice president, JD Vance. He says that in research on very poor communities in the Appalachians, the people who are most resilient turn out paradoxically to be the most self-deluded. It’s important for them, in order to get through the day, to have a much more unrealistically optimistic view of their situation.

I have realised that all of us are pretty eccentric and that we each just disguise this, either better or worse. And obviously I don’t disguise my eccentricity very much – but I don’t think it convinces me that the rest of the world is somehow more normal. The rest of the world just conceals their abnormality more skilfully.

 Do you think you know why you pushed yourself into politics?

 I think romanticism. I think it was a grand idea of government and public service. And I think we all, at some level in our lives, go through schools where we are made to read history books, and maybe people have a poster of Martin Luther King or Kennedy on their classroom wall. I think it’s very easy to feel this is your obligation, this is what you’ve got to do, that you’ve got to give back. And from the outside, it sounds very meaningful and important. The problem is that when you’re on the inside, you begin to realise that it’s a very, very bizarre, frustrating, often not very impactful life.

With any ambition, I think there is a push-pull between wanting recognition, and also by being revulsed by that recognition, by fame, for want of a better word…

 Yes, I think so. And I think I’ve still got a bit of that. I still find public events strange, and I think a part of sanity in politics is learning to distance yourself and realise that an audience or the voters are projecting onto you – maybe negatively, maybe positively – depending on how they’re feeling. But they’re not really engaging with you as a person; they’re engaging with an idea of you.

Who did you come across in your political career who was best able to play with that idea of them? Who was the best performer, I suppose?

 I guess Boris Johnson is a preternatural performer. He’s somebody who really enjoys that element of performance and public attention, and is very, very skilled at the timing, the jokes, being a celebrity. I mean, he’s unusual because he’s one of the few genuine celebrities in British politics. He’s more of the personality of a kind of stand-up comedian.

“On the first time, I had an experience lying in bed at night of feeling a kind of electric charge moving up from my toes – up through my knees, through my hips, up to my head, and then down again. I was sort of almost juddering on the bed. And then it didn’t stop – it kept going for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour...”

I’ve heard you say before that you became almost obsessed with Boris Johnson and his wrongdoings. I’ve even seen you describe how you attributed a pain in your knee to your negative thoughts about him…

 I think he became for me a representation of British politics not being serious. And I was very depressed that somebody like that would become Prime Minister. But I think I’m gradually emerging from that. I’m gradually thinking about him less. Now weeks go by without thinking about him. I think that’s probably a good thing.		

Part of Boris’s original appeal seemed linked to his poshness, which seemed linked to his education, and to the odd place that Eton in particular holds in the public psyche. You also went to Eton. I wonder what you think about that place now – and about the place of private schools in general at the moment?

 Well, I’m feeling more defensive of private schools now that Labour’s taken the VAT away and taken away their charitable status. And I don’t suppose there’s much point in re-litigating that decision now it’s been made. But I think they are exceptional schools. And they are relieving the taxpayer of having to pay. Parents who send their kids to private schools are not benefiting from free education. They’re paying extra to send their kids there. And now they’re not getting any kind of tax break for doing it. So it’s an expensive thing to do. But the fact that these parents continue to do it reflects the fact that I think these schools provide a really excellent education.

Now, that’s partly because of resources. And I don’t think we should be shy about admitting that their ability to do that is that they have much more money to spend on their pupils than a normal school – but I think they put it to very good use. It’s like the very best American universities. You know, I teach at Yale, and that is a very well-endowed place and students are very lucky. But I think they also get a very exceptional education at the end of it. I think it’s a very high-quality product.

 I guess I was super keen. I mean, I was sort of trying to do everything. I was in every possible club I could be in. I was trying to do lots of extracurricular sports, lots of acting, lots of societies, I did lots of plays. I was on the karate team. I was on the fencing team. I spent quite a lot of time climbing over roofs.

Right! Was that a sort of night-climbing thing?

 Night-climbing, yeah. I climbed over roofs at night. I stuck strange paisley patterned drapes on the top of buildings.

Was this just you or was there a collective?

 It was a collective. It was three or four of us who used to do this. I don’t think we had a name. But we were copying Ranulph Fiennes. Somebody had his autobiography, and we were repeating the climbs that he’d done over the roofs.

Do you worry about the world that your own children are growing up into?

No, I’m not that anxious. I mean, I think it’s possible to generate anxiety about almost anything. I guess if they’d been born in an earlier generation, you’d be anxious about your kids being killed by a nuclear bomb. But no, I’m not that anxious. I don’t think there’s much to be that anxious about. I think life is life. It kind of rolls on, and I think in some ways we’re very lucky. I think the world, despite all the problems and all the things we grumble about, is, in global terms, so much more peaceful than it was 70 or 80 years ago.

I read recently that your father died in the same year that your son was born. What do you remember from that time?

 Well, it was quite intimate. I delivered my son because he came very quickly before my wife could get to the hospital. And I was with my father when he died. But I think those are good things. I think in a world in which we’re often separated from the realities of life and death, I think it’s a great privilege to be able to deliver your child and to be able to be with your father when he died.

Are you calm in those moments of extreme emotion and jeopardy?

 Yes. It’s one of the few things that I’m reasonably good at. Yeah.

Your father said that he was glad you were there with him.

 Yeah. It’s a lovely thing to say. That was very special.

"What should be the reward is governing, being able to make a difference in the country, changing things. But so little of the time of the politician is actually put into the detail of what to do at the moment."

Your father questioned, I think, why you would want to go into politics. With things as they are right now, and with the state of social media, and the ancient truism that all political lives end in failure – the question now seems to be why anyone would want to enter into that world.

 It’s pretty difficult to answer that question. The truth is that if you do it properly, it’s a pretty unpleasant, exhausting life. You can do it with a kind of rhinoceros hide and just largely ignore everything that anyone says about you and not pay much attention to your job, which is what I feel some of my colleagues do.

And then there are other people. I had a colleague called David Gauke, who seemed to miraculously keep his conscience, keep his morality, listen to people and be able to function – but he’s quite unusual. For most people, it’s an incredibly strange and impersonal job.

And its reward is being on the front of the newspapers, because for some reason the newspapers are obsessed with politics. But of course, fewer and fewer people read the newspapers now anyway. And what should be the reward isn’t being in the newspapers. What should be the reward is governing, being able to make a difference in the country, changing things. But so little of the time of the politician is actually put into the detail of what to do at the moment. So much of it is about campaigning.

Somebody pointed out that in Liz Truss’s No 10, there were something like five times as many people working on press and media as were working on health, social care and education. And that’s because that has become the business of politics. That proportion represents the percentage that a lot of senior politicians’ time is dedicated to stuffing it to the opposition, getting the right media messaging, moving up in the polls.

And actually, somebody who’s worrying about what exactly is the right thing to do in the NHS is treated as a bit of a geek who’s missing the point. I mean, there’s sort of elements of a strange school here, as though it’s slightly swotty and disapproved-of to be too serious about the details of policy and government. What’s so shocking is the number of times MPs in the corridor would just laugh if I tried to engage them on a policy issue – as though I was just being boring.

You previously mentioned those colleagues with rhinoceros hides. How was your hide when you were a politician? And is it thicker or more sensitive now that you’re outside of politics, do you think?

 I think it’s a bit thicker – but it still remains a very odd job. I mean, it’s one of those jobs like being a commercial lawyer or an investment banker. There may be a few people who really enjoy it, but most people see the thing as pretty inhuman: the hours, the pressure, the expectations, the risk. These are not healthy jobs. And it’s not clear that the people who thrive in them are necessarily the healthiest personalities.

How did negative comments on social media affect you?

I think it would be very odd if you didn’t care at all what other people said about you. I mean, if you were actually able to pick up Twitter and see somebody saying, “this guy is a cowardly scumbag who lies about everything, steals money and sexually assaults people” and you just looked at that and you thought, “oh, well, that’s fine”, you’d be a bit of an odd person.

I think we expect politicians to be tough in a way that we wouldn’t expect any normal person to be. I don’t think it would be psychologically healthy to not be affected. And it is hard. Obviously, to some extent, you get used to it because, even outside politics, there’s enough of it going on every day for me not to take it too personally, and you begin to recognise some of the phrases. The three hundredth time you’re called a cowardly scumbag is obviously less painful than the first time.

 Are you optimistic for the future of politics in this country?

 I’m not so optimistic, but I believe in hope. I believe that we have to keep working to restore the world to a better place. I do think that there’s something very important about these ideas of equality and dignity, and I think we have to really fight for them. And it can be done. I’m not somebody who just says populism is inevitable, democracy is finished. I think that we can get there. We can do it.

What do you think your role in that will be? How will you deploy that hope?

 I guess I’m open to lots of things, but I’m also realistic about the way in which political doors close. I’m realistic about the sense that unless you’re very lucky, as people say, there’s nothing quite as ex as an ex-politician. And therefore, the future for me is probably in podcasting and writing, or maybe in policy work. Perhaps I can make a bigger contribution there than in elected politics.

This feature was taken from the Summer 2024 issue of Gentleman's Journal. Read about the issue 

Gordon Ramsay, known as the firebrand chef, now fully embraces being mother hen

Soft power: 10 years of Luca Faloni

Royal rumble: King Charles’s Land Rover Defender is up for sale