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When Rory Stewart returned to work after witnessing his beloved 93-year-old father’s passing, his boss, the former environment secretary Liz Truss, inquired about his weekend.
“I explained that my father had died,” Stewart writes in his new memoir. “She paused for a moment, nodded, and asked when the 25-year environment plan would be ready.”
Anecdotes like this are scattered throughout Politics on the Edge, Stewart’s brutally honest account of his nine-year tenure as an MP under Prime Ministers David Cameron and Theresa May.
Upon arriving in Westminster, he encountered a fellow Tory MP who growled, “Why don’t you just leave,” when Stewart tried to sit next to him in an unoccupied seat. He accepted his first ministerial appointment wearing a suit that had just been unintentionally drenched in cappuccino. He worked until he was completely exhausted. He even briefly contemplated suicide.
However, as I read the book last week, I was struck by the level of inexperience that still permeates Britain’s ruling classes. Or as Stewart puts it, “the Edwardian fantasy that a first-class degree from Oxford was qualification enough for anything.”
Inexperience was a prominent topic in UK news last week when Dame Sharon White, the head of the beleaguered John Lewis retail group, announced her resignation after just five years in the position. This will make her the shortest-serving chair in the retailer’s history, despite having previously served as a civil servant and media regulator. The fact that she lacked retail experience has generated much discussion.
Typically, the boards of large companies select leaders with some relevant industry experience, preferably as previous chief executives. The percentage of S&P 500 company CEOs with prior CEO experience increased from 4% to 16% between 1997 and 2019. Interestingly, this does not always lead to the desired outcomes. Several studies have shown that repeat CEOs often underperform first-time CEOs in terms of financial performance.
This may be due to the fact that repeat CEOs are often brought in to revive struggling organizations or rely on outdated strategies that are ill-suited for new business environments. However, it is relatively uncommon to see someone with no experience in the field take on a major CEO role.
Politics, on the other hand, operates differently. The cult of the talented amateur may not dominate British national life to the extent it once did, but even crucial positions in Westminster are filled in a manner that would be considered careless in other domains.
Stewart was particularly attuned to this, having been a soldier turned diplomat, adventurer, author, and Harvard professor who had worked in Afghanistan before becoming an MP.
He quickly realized that such experience held little weight in parliament, and this was not unique to his own situation.
In 2011, when thousands of British troops were deployed across Afghanistan, Stewart found that 50 Conservative colleagues had some form of military experience, including a full colonel, a Scots Guards captain, and former members of special forces. However, when selecting a new defense secretary that year, Cameron overlooked all of them.
Instead, he chose Philip Hammond, a transport secretary who, according to Stewart, “had no previous interest in defense or foreign affairs, had never even visited Afghanistan, and even ten years into the war, had still not bothered to learn the basic elements of Afghan history and geography.”
Stewart acknowledges that Hammond was not a failure; experts often make mistakes and a fresh perspective can be valuable. Additionally, Hammond possessed clear political skills.
However, it is difficult to argue against Stewart’s belief that it was “close to insane” to believe that military knowledge had no value when the country was embroiled in a major conflict.
Furthermore, while the UK appointed a string of defense secretaries with no defense background, their counterparts in the US included a high-ranking CIA officer and a four-star general from the Marine Corps.
Yes, the US system makes it easier to appoint external experts. But Stewart’s message is equally applicable. Two weeks before his book was published, Grant Shapps became the latest UK defense secretary. This was his fifth cabinet position in less than a year.
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