Rory Stewart and the Last Temptation of the British Establishment

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 30 September 2026

There is something profoundly attractive about Rory Stewart. That is precisely what makes some of his political ideas worth examining carefully. He is intelligent, unusually well read for a contemporary British politician, conspicuously interested in the world beyond Westminster and capable of writing about people with an attentiveness that is increasingly uncommon in political life. His latest book, Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders, is assembled substantially from columns written during his years as Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border, and its central preoccupation is the distance between the abstractions of national politics and the stubborn particularities of actual communities.

The book is therefore not a manifesto for government by aristocracy, and it would be unfair to describe it as one. Stewart repeatedly celebrates local knowledge, complains about the ignorance of distant administrators and presents the people of Cumbria not as passive subjects waiting for their betters to rescue them but as repositories of experience that central government frequently fails to understand. One sympathetic account of Middleland identifies precisely this theme: the incompatibility between the language of government — targets, metrics and frameworks — and the language of particular places, farms and families.

Nevertheless, behind Stewart’s humane observations lies a political philosophy that deserves considerably more scrutiny than it generally receives. Stewart appears attracted to an older British conception of public life in which privilege is tolerable, perhaps even desirable, provided that privilege recognises obligations. In a September 2026 discussion with Michael Gove, he defended private schools and argued, according to the programme’s published description, that the justification for privilege lies in fulfilling the obligations that accompany it. The same conversation connected his attitude towards wealth with an idea of public service.

This is a recognisable British political tradition. It is paternalism in its most intelligent and attractive form.

Its origins are much older than Stewart. The traditional British governing class did not invariably understand wealth, education and social position merely as private possessions. At its best, it regarded them as creating obligations. The landowner became a magistrate, the successful barrister entered Parliament, the retired soldier served on committees, the wealthy philanthropist endowed schools and hospitals and the fortunate young man educated at an ancient institution was repeatedly reminded that advantages brought responsibilities.

There is much about this tradition that was admirable. The difficulty lies not with its demand for responsibility but with the political assumptions hidden underneath it.

Stewart’s political imagination seems repeatedly to return to the figure of the cultivated public servant: intelligent, historically informed, sceptical of slogans, respectful of institutions, conscious of his own fallibility and prepared to sacrifice private advantage for public duty. In an earlier essay on politicians, Stewart contrasted the modern idea of the politician as managerial technician with Aristotle’s conception of the political leader as a virtuous and philosophical person. He recalled Gladstone as an example of the wealthy, intellectually cultivated statesman who entered politics as public service rather than simply as employment.

There is nothing objectionable about wanting politicians to be intelligent, educated, honest and conscientious. The problem begins when these characteristics become associated, even unconsciously, with a particular social formation.

For there is a dangerous ambiguity in the proposition that privilege justifies itself through obligation. The democratic answer is almost the reverse. Privilege does not need to justify itself by demonstrating the virtue of the privileged. Political institutions should be constructed so that citizens do not have to depend upon the virtue of privileged people in the first place.

That distinction is fundamental.

A benevolent governing class may be preferable to a rapacious governing class. A conscientious aristocrat may be preferable to an indifferent aristocrat. An Etonian who believes that his education imposes duties upon him may be more socially useful than an Etonian who regards education merely as an entrée into finance. None of this establishes that the existence of a disproportionately influential class, reproducing itself through wealth, educational institutions, social networks and cultural confidence, is democratically desirable.

The essential objection to paternalism has never been that the father is necessarily wicked. It is that everybody else is treated as a child.

Stewart himself complicates this criticism because much of Middleland is devoted to precisely the opposite insight. The inhabitants of Cumbria often know things that Whitehall does not. Farmers understand their landscape. Villagers understand their communities. Local people understand why apparently rational administrative reforms can destroy institutions whose social value cannot easily be entered into a spreadsheet. Stewart’s experience as an MP repeatedly taught him the inadequacy of centralised expertise. His longstanding prescription has included stronger local democracy and a greater degree of trust between politicians and citizens.

This creates a fascinating tension within Stewart’s political philosophy.

On the one hand stands Rory Stewart the democrat of the Cumbrian village hall. This Stewart distrusts centralised abstractions, respects practical knowledge, listens to farmers and parish councillors and believes that communities ought to exercise considerably more control over their own affairs. On the other stands Rory Stewart the classical public servant, attracted to learning, seriousness, expertise, institutional memory and the idea that unusually fortunate people ought to dedicate their talents to governing well.

Each instinct is defensible. They do not, however, fit together quite as comfortably as Stewart sometimes seems to imagine.

The problem becomes particularly acute when expertise is confused with political authority. Experts know things. That is why governments need economists, engineers, doctors, soldiers, diplomats, scientists, lawyers and administrators. Yet expertise cannot itself determine what society ought to value because political choices involve competing interests and moral priorities, not merely technical questions.

An economist might estimate the consequences of closing a railway. She cannot tell us how much a community ought to value retaining it. An environmental scientist can describe the ecological consequences of sheep farming. He cannot decide how much weight should be attached to preserving a centuries-old agricultural community. A Treasury official may calculate that maintaining a rural service is inefficient. The people who depend upon it may rationally conclude that efficiency is not the only value at stake.

Indeed this is one of the most appealing lessons contained within Middleland. Yet it also undermines any broader political culture in which exceptionally educated and conscientious people are imagined as particularly well equipped to identify the national interest.

Education can make people knowledgeable. It does not necessarily make them wise. Privilege can create opportunities for public service. It can also insulate people from the consequences of their own mistakes. Ethical seriousness is admirable, but there is no examination for moral judgement and no university possesses a monopoly upon it.

Britain has had long experience of the proposition that a highly educated administrative class can be trusted to govern conscientiously. Its record is decidedly mixed.

The British establishment produced people of extraordinary ability and dedication. It also produced monumental errors. The same traditions of elite public service that generated gifted diplomats, judges and administrators also generated imperial disasters, catastrophic military misjudgements and economic orthodoxies whose costs were borne predominantly by people who had played no part in devising them. Good intentions did not prevent error. Education did not eliminate prejudice. A strong sense of duty did not necessarily confer understanding of the lives of people outside the governing class.

This is the weakness in romanticising the ethical establishment. Its failures were not merely occasions upon which good people accidentally made mistakes. Sometimes the homogeneity of the governing class was itself part of the problem.

People educated in the same institutions, reading the same newspapers, attending the same universities and moving within overlapping professional networks can become extraordinarily good at recognising one another as sensible. Their shared assumptions disappear from view precisely because everybody in the room shares them.

Stewart himself provides evidence for this phenomenon. Politics on the Edge, his previous political memoir, attacked a Westminster system in which ministers were frequently ignorant of their briefs, Cabinet government could be superficial and party advancement could reward characteristics having little relationship with administrative competence. He complained about constant ministerial reshuffling and the inability of politicians to acquire genuine expertise.

Yet the answer to these problems cannot simply be to locate better members of the elite.

A democracy ought to be capable of producing institutions in which mediocre politicians cannot do catastrophic damage, in which experts can advise without governing by right, in which officials can be challenged by people possessing practical rather than academic knowledge and in which political authority ultimately derives from citizens rather than from the perceived moral quality of those exercising it.

That last distinction is particularly important in contemporary Britain because public confidence in institutions has become fragile. Telling citizens that government requires cleverer, more experienced and more ethically serious people may be perfectly sensible. Telling them, or even appearing to tell them, that the solution is restoration of a governing culture associated with elite education and inherited social confidence risks misunderstanding the nature of the dissatisfaction.

The complaint of many citizens is not merely that the wrong people have occupied the commanding heights. It is that the commanding heights have become too remote.

Here Stewart’s own Cumbrian experiences point towards a more radical conclusion than his establishment instincts sometimes permit. If people possess what he has elsewhere called a “genius for the local”, then perhaps the purpose of political reform should not principally be to improve the quality of those governing from London. It should be to reduce the number of decisions London makes. Stewart has himself advocated directly elected local representatives and argued that politicians must learn to trust the public.

That is a different conception of politics. It substitutes dispersed authority for benevolent administration.

There is also something peculiarly nostalgic about the ideal of noblesse oblige in twenty-first-century Britain. The social bargain upon which it once depended has largely disappeared. The traditional establishment could at least claim that privilege entailed expectations of military service, public administration, charitable work or political responsibility. Modern wealth does not necessarily operate that way. Capital is international, professional careers are mobile and the relationship between economic privilege and particular communities is increasingly attenuated.

One may therefore sympathise with Stewart’s desire to recover the duty while questioning whether recovering the hierarchy is either possible or desirable.

There is another danger. Once political legitimacy becomes associated with education, seriousness and expertise, disagreement can too easily be reclassified as ignorance. The person who rejects the recommendation of an economist becomes economically illiterate. The voter who distrusts an institution becomes a populist. The community that resists an administratively elegant reform becomes sentimental. Political disagreement is gradually transformed into a distinction between people who understand and people who do not.

That temptation ought to be resisted with particular determination by educated people.

The person without a degree has precisely the same political dignity as the professor. The warehouse worker’s vote does not require validation by an economist. A farmer who has never read Aristotle may understand the social ecology of his valley better than a civil servant with several postgraduate qualifications. Democracy is not an unfortunate mechanism by which knowledgeable people periodically obtain permission from the less knowledgeable to continue governing them.

Stewart himself has articulated something close to this principle. Writing about democracy, he argued that its justification does not depend upon producing superior economic or administrative outcomes. Democracy matters because it embodies political equality: citizens possess equal dignity and an equal right to choose their government.

That principle deserves to be taken further than Stewart’s paternalistic instincts sometimes appear willing to carry it.

The most compelling aspect of Rory Stewart’s politics is therefore also the source of its central contradiction. He genuinely respects people. He is curious about them. He walks through their villages, listens to their histories, learns the names of their hills and tries to understand the institutions they have created. Middleland is explicitly presented as a book about a people whom national politics too frequently forgets and about a better relationship between politics and the communities it represents.

Yet hovering behind this democratic sympathy is an older image of Britain: a country held together by cultivated people of good character who understand that fortune imposes duties, who take institutions seriously and who quietly ensure that everything continues to work.

It is an immensely seductive image.

Perhaps that Britain existed occasionally. Perhaps some fragments of it still do. There have unquestionably been privileged British men and women whose sense of duty produced lives of remarkable public service. There is no reason to sneer at them, and contemporary culture’s occasional assumption that privilege automatically negates virtue is as intellectually lazy as the proposition that privilege guarantees it.

But a political system cannot rest upon the hope that those who possess advantages will also possess virtue.

The greater achievement is to construct institutions that do not require saints. Checks and balances exist because good intentions are insufficient. Elections exist because rulers cannot be expected reliably to judge their own performance. Political pluralism exists because intelligence does not produce agreement. Local government exists because knowledge is dispersed. Freedom of speech exists because respectable opinion can be wrong.

And democracy exists because adults should not have to demonstrate sufficient education, expertise or refinement before acquiring an equal share in deciding how they are governed.

This is why Stewart remains such an intriguing political figure. His diagnosis of modern British government is often more persuasive than the philosophy that occasionally seems to lurk behind his remedies. He is surely right to lament superficial politicians, institutional amnesia, administrative incompetence, the degradation of public service and the replacement of serious argument by slogans. Middleland is also persuasive in depicting the extraordinary quantities of knowledge buried within local communities and routinely overlooked by central government.

But the answer to the failure of Britain’s elites need not be better elites.

It may instead be less elitism.

Britain certainly needs educated people in public life. It needs ethical people, experienced people and people willing to devote substantial parts of their lives to the unglamorous business of government. It should encourage privilege to recognise obligations rather than pretending that personal success is wholly self-created. Stewart’s insistence upon seriousness, responsibility and public service therefore contains an important truth.

What must be rejected is the final paternalistic step: the suggestion, whether explicit or merely implicit, that those qualities confer a special title to political authority.

The ethical graduate of an ancient university may have much to contribute to Britain. So does the nurse, the builder, the farmer, the shopkeeper, the Ukrainian refugee, the small-business owner and the person who left school at sixteen. Their different forms of knowledge cannot be arranged neatly into a hierarchy with the traditionally educated governing class sitting at its summit.

Rory Stewart’s humane conservatism asks privileged people to become better custodians. The more thoroughly democratic response is to ask why the rest of society should need custodians at all.