The most obvious response to Rory Stewart's thoroughly satisfying political memoir Politics on the Edge is what a tragedy it was that when this thoughtful, diligent and serious politician put himself forward as the next leader of his party in 2019, his Conservative colleagues chose instead the moral abyss that is Boris Johnson.
At the time Stewart himself warned of the complete unsuitability of Johnson for the role, during a campaign in which he briefly became the favourite Tory of non-Tories. In his memoir he frequently refers to Johnson's "staggering willingness to insist on the untrue" as well as his less appealing characteristics.
What Stewart makes clear in his book, however, is that a large proportion of the first electorate in the Tories' two stage process - 300 members of the Conservative Parliamentary Party - knew this full well too. For a range of reasons from naked self-interest to cowardice, they decided not to do what was best the country and voted for him anyway, with entirely predictable results.
Stewart then found himself on the outside looking in, losing the Conservative whip in Boris Johnson's great purge of the sane and sensible in September 2019 and then out of Parliament altogether after the December general election. He returned to a semi private life, as a fellow at Yale University teaching politics. And he also become half of one of the UK's most successful podcast duos, joining Alastair Campbell in The Rest is Politics.
And he set about writing this book, which is a hugely entertaining and revealing read that takes us through one of the most turbulent periods in UK politics from the coliation victory in 2010 to Johnson's electoral triumph in late 2019. During this period Stewart held a number of minsterial posts, covering everything from the environment to international development and prisons. In a political world increasingly in thrall to the 24 hour news cycle, with many politicians more interested in spin than substance, Stewart reveals himself as a serious and diligent public servant, desperate to leave things better than he found them.
The parts that cover his time as Prisons Minister in the Department of Justice is perhaps the most interesting. The UK's overcrowded, crumbling and often stil Victorian prisons are dirty and full of violence and drugs. While Stewart finds the prison service and its officers trying to do their best in a very bad situation, many senior officials are disillusioned and fatalistic about ever being able to solve their problems in the face in the face of severely constrained budgets. But Stewart sets out with energy and determination to get back to brass tacks to rid prisons of violence and drugs, and in 2018 during a radio interview says he will resign if he failed to show results in pilot schemes run in 10 difficult prisons in 12 months. He succeeds.
Anyone currently despairing of the quality of political life in the UK - is anybody not? - will find little here to cheer them up. Stewart paints a portrait of a system in which almost every single element is in decline and badly managed, from the cabinet, to parliament and to most departments. He finds vain and foolish politicians where we need titans and geniuses. His depiction of three of the four Tory PMs he served under - Cameron, Johnson and Truss - will reinforce every negative perception of them.
The compensation for the misery is that the book is funny, fascinating and important. It is stuffed full of entertaining anecodtes, astute insight and perceptive commentary. In the hands of another politican it might have been inusfferably smug. But Stewart is charmingly self-deprecating and that gives him licence to document the weakness of others.
Five stars.