Comments by "gerhard7" (@gerhard7323) on "The Truth Behind The Fall Of The UK - Rory Stewart" video.

  1. Great Unherd comment: Last year, Julie Burchill posed the question, “Do you know a Mary Sue – a self-adoring paragon of virtue who can only ever admit to faults which are actually boasts in disguise?” As I read the article I was pondering who might be the biggest ‘Mary Sue’ in recent British Politics, when I realised it was not so much a Mary Sue as a ‘Rory Stew.’ No doubt Harriet Harperson would damn the patriarchy for stealing yet another accolade from the Sisterhood, but the biggest Mary Sue is, horrors, a bloke – to give him his full title, Roderick James Nugent Stewart OBE FRSGS FRSL, academic, diplomat, author, broadcaster, former soldier, rumoured-spook and politician-turned-podcaster. Haunted Eddie Redmayne, if fashioned by the chaps at Aardman Animation after a long lunch. Rory is a man of undoubted abilities – but there’s no one in less doubt of his abilities than he is himself. His particular skill is the self-effacing humble-brag. Whilst often appearing to apologise for the privileges bestowed on him by his Eton and Balliol education, he still always manages to compare himself favourably to other Eton/Oxford grads and remind you that Boris is not really that posh after all. Nor, even, David Cameron. Rory’s never too shy to coyly drop a mention that, of course, he tutored the young Princes William & Harry, whilst his Spectator Diary was peppered with (seemingly casual) asides of his velvet-knickerbockered childhood, his view of Hyde Park from the windows of a large town house that has been in the family for generations and is close enough to Knightsbridge barracks that the Household Cavalry clop by, …. oh, and did I mention I’m a regular visitor to Highgrove? There’s no question he’s led a genuinely interesting and varied life, and is a man with a prodigious CV – though his recollections do seem to differ from others who were present at each stage of his storied career. His brief stint as a Provincial Deputy Governor in Iraq earned him the sobriquet “Florence of Arabia” from the embedded press, as he loved nothing more than to have his photo taken in the desert, wearing flowing robes and striking suitably warrior-poet-philosopher poses. Nothing could skewer Rory’s unadmitted hunger for acclaim more than his hero T.E. Lawrence’s observation of his own “craving to be famous, and a horror of being known to like being known”. In his memoir – and every time I’ve heard him speak – Rory casts himself as the reluctant hero, come to save the country from Tory populism, and the Tories from themselves. For a man who claims not to want to be centre-stage, he seems to have a preternatural ability to wander ‘unknowingly’ into the limelight. He makes much of the idea that he’d like nothing more than to live the life of a poet, or perhaps a Victorian explorer, but duty calls and thus he reluctantly puts down his slim volume of Ovid to take up the challenge of leading the Tory Party or to have a run at becoming Mayor of London. How galling that both jobs were snaffled up by his deeply unserious nemesis. Rory Stew hates Brexit, natch, but above all he loathes Boris Johnson – really despises him. Predictably the subject of Brexit and Boris provide much fodder for the podcast Rory co-hosts with the bagpipe-bothering Blairite bully-boy, Alastair Campbell. One wonders whether what Rory-Stew most dislikes about Bo-Jo is that they’re both sharp-elbowed Old Etonians who cultivated their quirks and studied eccentricities to a level of theatrical performance, yet it was the shambolic Boris who, unfathomably, succeeded in attaining the top job. If you want a Guardian masterclass in how to squeeze self-aggrandisement and noble suffering into a description of one’s own humiliation, this takes some beating: “I had been rejected by my colleagues in the leadership race and I had been unable to prevent a man who was the antithesis of everything I valued in public life becoming the prime minister. I lost confidence in myself, my judgment and – because so many of its people had voted for Boris Johnson – almost in the country itself. In 2020, I moved to Yale University to teach and reflect on what I had learned in government and in defeat.” Rory Stewart, 'a sneery little know it all who simultaneously fails to come to any discernible point about anything'.
    1