As the UK heads into its general election on July 4th, David Remnick had an interesting interview with Rory Stewart who was at one time an ambitious Conservative politician and member of parliament in the UK, intent on climbing up the leadership ladder and someday becoming prime minister. He had all the pre-requisites for a Conservative party leader, coming from a privileged family, attending an elite private school (Eton) and then Oxford University, and he quickly rose up the party ranks after he first became an MP in 2010. He competed for party leader in 2019, losing to Boris Johnson.

He was opposed to a ‘no-deal Brexit’ and during the period leading up to the Brexit vote, he became seriously disillusioned with being a politician and quit and wrote a book How Not to Be a Politician that became a bestseller in the UK where it was called Politics on the Edge. The book reveals how soul-killing and phony the day-to-day life of a politician is and the degrading things one has to do to stay in the game.

The write up for the Resnick interview has this to say.

On July 4th—while the U.S. celebrates its break from Britain—voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls and, according to all predictions, oust the current government. The Conservative Party has been in power for fourteen years, presiding over serious economic decline and widespread discontent. The narrow, contentious referendum to break away from the European Union, sixty per cent of Britons now think, was a mistake. Yet the Labour Party shows no inclination to reverse or even mitigate Brexit. If the Conservatives have destroyed their reputation, why won’t Labour move boldly to change the direction of the U.K.? Is the U.K. hopeless? David Remnick is joined by Rory Stewart, who spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and now co-hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” He left the government prior to Brexit and wrote his best-selling memoir, “How Not to Be a Politician,” which pulls no punches in describing the soul-crushing sham of serving in office. “It’s not impostor syndrome,” Stewart tells Remnick. “You are literally an impostor, and you’re literally on television all the time claiming to understand things you don’t understand and claiming to control things you don’t control.”

As a consummate insider in Conservative politics, Stewart has some interesting things to to say about that world. He claims that the Conservative party had, within a center-right ideological framework, always maintained the image of being prudent stewards of the economy, the sober ones who could be trusted not to do wild and crazy things, the people the country turned to when they sought stability and continuity. Not anymore. He says that the party has completely destroyed its brand with a succession of leaders, especially Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, who espoused reckless policies, starting with Brexit, that have caused great turmoil and undermined the economy.

There are of course obvious parallels with the Republican party in the US. They too had long cultivated the brand of being steady and pragmatic advocates of a business-friendly government,. But now they have completely destroyed that brand and have become a cult that follows a reckless, self-serving narcissist in serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) as he lurches from one policy prescription to another, all of them on the basis of lies and fantasies.

The main difference is that in the UK, even though Boris Johnson (the closest analog there to SSACFT) led them to a big general election victory, the party did not fully embrace and condone all his actions and in the end he was forced out by party insiders. In the US, the GOP has totally capitulated to the cult of SSACFT, despite him doing and saying much worse things than Johnson. In the US we have witnessed the most shocking and revolting groveling by senior figures in the party who had once condemned SSACFT in the harshest terms for his obvious deficiencies but now fawn over him, despite being well aware that he is a pernicious influence. The difference may lie in the fact that some of those among UK Conservatives who helped push Johnson out saw that as a way to advance their own fortunes and his followers were not strong enough to undermine them, while in the US, leading GOP politicians seem to have concluded that advancing (or at least saving) their political careers required them to unquestioningly suck up to SSACFT.

You can listen to the full interview that lasts about 35 minutes.