Those perplexed by the awful Present often invent a past Golden Age, when all was well. For the Senators of late Rome, it was the reign of Augustus. For elderly Britons, it is an imagined, monochrome version of the 1950s. For those of us of a vaguely progressive, liberal persuasion it has to have been that time between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attack on the World Trade Centre in 1991, those dozen -or-so years when reason appeared to have triumphed, and all things seemed possible.
One man who knew that time, was nurtured in it and seemed destined to occupy a gilded position therein was Rory Stewart, a sometime soldier, diplomat, Tory MP and Minister and now a soulmate of New Labour honcho Alistair Campbell, whose name is synonymous with the epoch. As an insider, Stewart had a privileged view of how those years crumbled to dust, in a saga of failures so awe-inspiringly catastrophic that no fiction writer would ever dare pitch them to a publisher: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Financial Crash, stagnant wages, Putin, the rise of China….and on to horrors like Trump and Johnson (whom Stewart at least had the fibre to oppose in a leadership contest) And through it all the British Parliament (both parties) sat in dazed, stupefied incomprehension, like cavalry generals suddenly faced with tanks. It’s all here [1] and if you want more, then you should buy the man’s book [2]
Stewart was different; he possesses a rare extra gift of self awareness, a quality not normally associated with those who have passed through Eton and the backbenches of the Conservative Party. It has led him to question every assumption of our desperately flawed interventions in other lives. And, courageously he posits new models of development and cooperation which might mitigate the damage. Time will tell. But for us the message of the work is much deeper. It is just when you think you are having a golden age that you are piling up the unseen errors which will lead you to ruin. We knew about climate change, We did next to nothing. We knew about inequality and corporate power. We did nothing. We danced, we partied, we raved, we bought the Daily Telegraph. Welcome to today.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/16/rory-stewart-tory-mp-decade-incompetent
[2] Rory Stewart Politics on the Edge Vintage 2023
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Stewart
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