Articles by Christopher de Bellaigue

Technology

Rewilding Rory Stewart

Until its abolition before the last election, Penrith and the Border was England’s biggest, most sparsely populated constituency. Elected the local MP in 2010, Rory Stewart became a minister under David Cameron and Theresa May, voted to remain in the Brexit referendum and had the Tory whip withdrawn by Boris Johnson in 2019, after which he gave up his seat and started, with Alastair Campbell, The Rest Is Politics. The move from parliamentarian to podcaster was smooth and unsurprising; even when he ran against Johnson to be party leader and prime minister, Stewart was one of those MPs, rare in a chamber of professional politicians fixated on high office, whose hinterland of causes, interests and obsessions might send them in another direction. The founder of a charity in post-invasion Afghanistan, a proconsul in US-run Iraq and an habitué of the common rooms of Harvard and Yale, Stewart resented the soul-destroying compromises that were required of the rising MP. So perplexed were party bosses by the bumptious newcomer that Cameron implausibly compared him to the late Julian Amery, a Tory grandee who kept a stuffed tiger in the hall of his palatial house in Eaton Square. It’s certainly hard to imagine Amery choosing – as the member for Penrith and the Border did – to live in a rough Cumbrian cottage whose kitchen floor flooded whenever the neighbouring beck overflowed, or making do with the charred bit of beef that Stewart, a Scot who exhibits some of the austerities of the manse, apparently considers acceptable fare. Of course, bills need to be paid, but Stewart is, as a thinker, more complex than the formula of the current affairs podcast, and its worship of instantaneity, would suggest. The son of an MI6 officer and Sinologist – an “extreme Scottish extrovert”, as he writes in Middleland, “serving haggis aggressively to his English guests” – he is a rural romantic and an impassioned advocate of the union. Indeed, an earlier book, The Marches (2016), proposes that, far from being irrevocably divided, northern England and southern Scotland (the “middleland” after which the new book is named) constitute a historical and cultural whole. Stewart notes that the 12th-century Scottish king David I described himself as the ruler not only of Gaelic Scots but also of Northumbrians, Flemings and Cumbric Britons. The “dispatches” that Stewart brings together in Middleland were first published in the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald. I was recently in the editorial office about my own book – the Herald takes a friendly interest in local writers. It is a rare bright spot in Penrith, a once-dignified town of red Eden Valley sandstone whose heartland of arcades and shopping streets has been on life support ever since Sainsbury’s and Morrisons clamped their monstrous suckers to the unsuspecting fringe. Stewart opposed the Sainsbury’s scheme on the grounds, amply borne out, that it would hurt local retail. He went on to allay suspicions of Luddism or Nimbyism by campaigning for superfast broadband and dual carriageways. But his popularity lasted only until Brexit, when he and his constituents picked different sides. Some of the pieces in Middleland were written on the train north from London; they were edited in the bath late at night and vetted by Stewart’s wife, Shoshana, in case they were too “political, pretentious or muddled”. They include meditations on the Crosby Garrett Helmet, a 2,000-year-old Roman cavalry mask recovered in a field in his constituency; wind farms in the Solway Firth (he was opposed but has since changed his mind); and local arts patron Mary Burkett – another “offcomer” who took to Cumbria in a big way, in Burkett’s case promoting artists from her base in a haunted pele tower on a bend, pungent with wild garlic, of the River Derwent. Stewart maintains that concepts like “management, efficiency and technology” are less relevant to the Eden Valley economy of small businesses, farms and high-end tourism than “relationships, local knowledge and extreme adaptability.” Stewart’s emphasis on small battalions makes him a Burkean; his veneration of the Cumbrian farmer puts him in the tradition of the 19th-century romantics. As an example of the community action he prizes, he points to Crosby Ravensworth, “a picture perfect village” whose average house price in 2010 was £315,000 – accessible only to offcomers and the old. Rather than bring in a developer, the village came together to build 22 environmentally friendly houses, “some rendered, some faced in limestone and some in sandstone; a very Cumbrian concoction sitting comfortably in the heart of the village”. And the job was done fast: “There were none of the objections which you find when development is imposed from outside.” In 2011 Stewart persuaded Cameron to visit Crosby Ravensworth; for what was the new development if not an example of his Big Society in action? The Libyan revolution against Gaddafi was approaching its climax and while Cameron was in the constituency Stewart informed the prime minister that he would soon be off to Tripoli. “Try not to get yourself killed,” came the reply. “We wouldn’t want a by-election.” Stewart the writer seems happiest when picking his way between the present and the past. He reminds us that the idyllic fellsides of today’s Lake District once echoed to the “hammers and detonations of miners and quarry-men”, noting in another the contribution of medieval monks to the economy of the area. “They felled trees,” he writes admiringly, “drained mires, cleared the bracken and gorse, and cropped the grass. They laid mile upon mile of dry-stone wall. They developed better breeds [of sheep], and they hefted the sheep to the hills.” “Hefting” refers to the traditional practice of inculcating in a flock the instinct to graze the same unenclosed hills and never stray from them, generation after generation; in this miraculous event and in the heroic figure of the hill farmer, no less “stout of heart, and strong of limb” than the shepherd Wordsworth describes in one of his poems, Stewart sees Cumbria’s glory. But there has been a “stark and fatal erosion of rural life” over recent decades, an economic, social and demographic malaise that has been exacerbated by the current government’s abolition of farming subsidies and its plans to levy inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1m. Each year the number of farmers active in the valley where Stewart used to live, and where I live now, goes down as the children of farmers who have died or retired give up uneconomic tenancies. Four-hundred-year-old cottages are stripped of their inglenook hearths and salt cupboards and equipped with the underfloor heating, wine coolers and streaming bundles that are the indispensable features of the holiday let. The deer have been culled, bracken has overtaken the upper slopes, and rivers straightened in the last century have had their curves reintroduced under flood-mitigation schemes. Only this week volunteers were planting bulbs along the valley floor, turning pasture into wildflower meadow. The sphagnum moss and bog asphodel will return, and with them peat, butterflies and curlews – welcome evidence for carbon sequestration and restored biodiversity. But while one applauds this determination to atone for the damage done to the natural world, there are doubts too; what if by taking sheep off the land we offshore emissions and the food supply while obliterating an essential part of who we are? One of the responsibilities of government, Stewart insists, is to “preserve some of what we cherish”, including “our small farms and our living villages”. That would be news to the monoculturists of Australia, Brazil and the United States, where angst over dying traditions is considered an unhelpful distraction from the objective of producing cheap and plentiful food. It was mere “pageantry”, as an American acquaintance of mine once described the attitude to hill farming described in James Rebanks’s English Pastoral (2020). With Brexit settled, the fight in Stewart’s former constituency is now between traditional tenant farmers and their landlords who wish to take land out of production and receive environmental grants and revenue from private sector offsets, producing anything but food. Stewart’s writing on all these subjects combines erudition, a fine turn of phrase (“walking makes each yard of ground equal”), disarming admissions of fallibility and a certain amount of backing into the limelight. Having written extensively about his walks, his work, his culture and his loves – not to mention his cheerfully acknowledged “Twitter addiction” – he is his own far-from-uncritical biographer. Colin Kidd, an eminent intellectual historian of Scotland, once called him “as Scottish as a bowler hat”. This doesn’t quite seem fair; if not Scottish, what is he? An Anglo-Scottish upbringing with tentacles in empire and a formation at Eton and Oxford inevitably expose him to brickbats north of the border, but given the sincerity of his attachments – Afghanistan; Cumbria; Robert Burns – it may be more apt to say that, like his beloved stone-wallers, Stewart stacks allegiances one on top of the other, even when they don’t appear to fit. What kind of politics would this champion of adaptability have pursued had he represented one of the industrial and maritime constituencies of West Cumbria? Here life expectancy can be 20 years lower than in the Eden Valley and no amount of “relationships, local knowledge and extreme adaptability” will make up for decades of government neglect and lack of investment. Whether he is disporting himself in Yale as Professor in the Practice of Grand Strategy – his current, almost pontifical post – or at the Penrith livestock mart, Stewart seems most comfortable either on an international stage or a local one. To judge by the book he wrote about his experience of national politics, Politics on the Edge (2023), he found the incessant negotiation with civil servants, barmy ministers (Lizz Truss, anyone?) and fellow MPs wearisome and demoralising. His experience of the constituency, by contrast, offered “the most stimulating decade of my life”. If he returns to a public stage, which, at 52 years of age, seems eminently possible, the models on offer range from Richard Holbrooke to the Old Man of Lochnagar. But no matter how much fans of The Rest Is Politics might wish otherwise, it is hard to imagine Stewart’s return to national politics or indeed where might fit in to it. In the meantime the trends identified in this wise and gentle book worsen. In Penrith a drapery and clothing store has announced that it is closing after 283 years of business. Rebanks rails against rewilding. The price of meat soars. The fat lands of the Eden are angry at what people see as the wilful obtuseness of a system working against their interests. In the words of an old-timer I spoke to recently whose family has been farming these hills for generations, “In ten years’ time them land, good land, which they took the sheep off of, they’ll be filling ’em with sheep again.” Christopher de Bellaigue is the founder of the Lake District Book Festival and is currently writing a book about farming. Middleland: Dispatches from the BordersRory StewartJonathan Cape, 352pp, £22 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops