Rory Stewart
Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. He served briefly as an officer in the British Army (the Black Watch), studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British Representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal -- a journey described in The Places in Between.
In 2003, he became the coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar -- two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of Southern Iraq. He has written for a range of publications including the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times and Granta. In 2004, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire and became a Fellow of the Carr Centre at Harvard University. In 2006 he moved to Kabul, where he established the Turquoise Mountain Foundation.
In 2010 he was elected as a Conservative member of the British Parliament. In 2014 was elected chair of the Defence Select Committee. He served under David Cameron as Minister for the Environment from 2015 to 2016. He served as a minister throughout Theresa May’s government as Minister of State for International Development, Minister of State for Africa and Minister of State for Prisons. He ultimately joined the Cabinet and National Security Council as Secretary of State for International Development. After May announced she would be stepping down, Stewart stood as a candidate to be Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 2019 leadership contest. His campaign was defined by his unorthodox use of social media and opposition to a no-deal Brexit. He stated at the beginning of his campaign that he would not serve under Boris Johnson and when Johnson became prime minister, in July 2019, Stewart resigned from the cabinet.
On 3 October 2019 Stewart announced he had resigned from the Conservative Party and that he would stand down as an MP at the next general election. He initially put himself up to be an independent candidate in the 2021 London mayoral election but withdrew on 6 May 2020 on the grounds of the election being postponed due to COVID-19, saying he could not maintain the campaign so long against the big budgets of the Labour and Conservative campaigns. In September 2020 he became a fellow at Yale University, teaching politics and international relations.
“If democracy is to be rebuilt … it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public.”
“Man's life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever”
“The question shouldn't be what we ought to do, but what we can do.”
“Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.”
“I recited and followed this song-of-the-places-in-between as a map.”
“He [Babur] was a type of mastiff, bred to fight against wolves, dogs, and humans. . . . The mastiff is perhaps the oldest breed of dog in the world. . . . The dogs of Ghor . . . were always regarded as particularly special mastiffs. . . . 'so powerful that in frame and strength every one of them is a match for a lion.”
“Everyone had memorized a chant of names and villages along footpaths in every direction. This was a very useful map.”
“I wondered if walking was not a form of dancing.”
“In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.”
“Genghis Khan's 'arrow messengers' could travel 450 kilometers a day.”
“I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better.”
“My feet beat out a steady muffled rhythm. My thoughts participated in each step, never getting ahead of me.”
“I had been walking one afternoon in Scotland and thought: Why don't I just keep going? There was, I said, a magic in leaving a line of footprints stretching across Asia.”
“Unlike most travel writers, he [Babur] is honest.”
“I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball.”
“In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget.... For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor. p. 264”