What Rory Stewart did next

Rory Stewart’s pitch for prime minister seems strangely distant now, lost in the enveloping chaos of Boris Johnston’s shamble to glory. All is not lost, however. The divergent metrics of parliamentary and public sentiment – and the character deficits of the frontrunner, who claims to be able to square that circle – make it abundantly possible that Stewart will have another chance to shine before the year is out. So what should he be doing in the meantime?

I was peripherally involved in Stewart’s leadership campaign, helping to organise some of his Northern Ireland visit, including a trip to my home county (and Britain’s true Lake District) Fermanagh.

Here Stewart shone as the man who invented ‘slow politics’ – an interest in the lives of people for whom Westminster’s carnival of narcissism is a frenetic, peripheral and alienating experience. I put him together with farmers worried about the consequences, from tariffs to animal welfare, of a no-deal Brexit.