Rory Stewart has spoken of never wanting to go back into politics, saying he found being a Conservative minister “very unpleasant” and admitting: “I feel like a fraud all the time, in a whole series of ways.”
Mr Stewart ran to succeed Theresa May as prime minister and Tory leader in 2019 and came to prominence for his amusing and highly personal use of social media.
He resigned from the Conservative Party in 2019 after losing the whip from eventual leader Boris Johnson and stood down as MP for Penrith and the Border later that year.
The former minister and current podcaster, 51, admitted that he struggled to “be in three places at once” working for constituents, scrutinising legislation in Westminster and tackling wars abroad.
He told the Hay Festival audience he was expected to be in his constituency “and everybody’s expecting me to be 350 miles away from Cumbria in Westminster scrutinising legislation and voting on legislation.
“I’m also the minister for Africa, and everybody’s expecting me to be in South Sudan worrying about the delivery of aid and how we deal with the civil war.”
Yet “on social media, I’m pretending I’m in all three at the same time. I’m sending out tweets, ‘Here I am in South Sudan with a warlord’, ‘Here I am in Cumbria with a farmer’, ‘Here I am in Westminster scrutinising legislation’, right? And at no time am I actually with my family or going to Pret or doing any of the things that I might want to do.”
He added he felt like a fraud even talking to the audience on Saturday and still feels like he was walking a “tightrope” all the time.
He said: “I can chit-chat, I can dance around, I can sell you ideas, I can maybe even make you vote for me, but I’m aware that the situation is fundamentally unstable, that at some point, one, or 10, or 20 or a hundred of you are going to wake up and be like, ‘Who is this p****? Why am I listening to him? He’s a fraud, he’s a hypocrite.’”
He revealed he even “thought briefly” about committing suicide in 2010 after telling a journalist that some areas of his constituency were “pretty primitive, people holding up their trousers with bits of twine”.
He quickly dismissed this as a “very excessive reaction” because most of his constituents “didn’t really care and thought it was quite funny”.
The Eton-educated ex-soldier and diplomat insisted that his comments were aimed at debunking the idea that Cumbria was a wealthy area that could afford spending cuts.
Stewart is expected to cover the election for Channel 4 alongside Emily Maitlis and fellow The Rest Is Politics podcast host Alastair Campbell.
