It’s slightly bizarre that anyone wants to listen to this.” Tieless in an open-necked white shirt, Stewart speaks in full sentences, occasionally grimacing when asked a knotty question. “And it’s been a surprisingly strange and painless experience. “I came into it not really knowing what I was doing,” says Stewart. He has found an unlikely following among liberal-leaning politics fans who would typically shun anything to do with an ex-Tory cabinet minister, but give Stewart a pass because of his willingness to excoriate Boris Johnson and share juicy titbits of Conservative party gossip. The Rest Is Politics, which he presents with the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, regularly tops the UK podcast charts. Only now, at 49, is Stewart plunging into the zeitgeist, as a hit podcaster. “I always wanted to try to live a life that would feel like a storybook,” the former Conservative MP muses on a video call from New York. At 30, he was made deputy governor of Maysan province during the Iraq war, effectively serving as the modern equivalent of a colonial administrator. At 29, he walked across rural Afghanistan, dodging Taliban fighters, to emulate the derring-do of the 18th-century explorers he grew up idolising.
At three, he named his rocking horse Bucephalus, after Alexander the Great’s famed steed.
R ory Stewart has long been a man out of time.
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