If Rory Stewart had taken full advantage of his education at Eton and read classics at Oxford rather than PPE, he would not have made the basic mistakes that blew apart his short-lived campaign to become prime minister. Not that his failure was one of content: far from it. His views on public services and Brexit were entirely predictable and could be correct. So what went wrong?
His failure was one of rhetoric, the skill of peaceful persuasion dissected by Aristotle and further refined by Cicero; and his failure consisted in his being so swept away by his millions of followers on social media that he started to believe his own hype, as if that guaranteed victory. But to win, you must persuade those who are not your followers.
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