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Few political memoirs survive for long.Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge: An Inside Memoir (Jonathan Cape, £22) There may be an exception. Alan Clark’s diary left an indispensable record of the Thatcher era; Stewart’s memoirs are a wonderful portrait of the Cameron-May-Johnson era. It may well become a classic as famous as The Clark Diaries.
Stewart, like Clark, is a keen observer, but also a vicious observer. He recorded Boris Johnson opening the meeting by saying: “You can’t believe a word I’m going to say.” It would be nice if Johnson was so candid with voters. As a junior minister, Stewart worked under Liz Truss and found that she valued “exaggerated simplicity” and was “allergic to caution and detail”. When Truss became prime minister, the British people made the same discovery, but at great cost to the country.
Unlike Clark, a reactionary who relished the political game for its own sake, Stewart was a liberal Conservative with an old-fashioned sense of duty. He apparently found many of the civil servants he worked with irritable and evasive. But, I know, some people found working with him inspiring and energizing.
Stewart describes Britain’s political system and culture in often hilarious terms. His portrait of a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Justice, with his collection of modern art and flamboyant jargon, could have come from the pages of Evelyn Waugh. But the overall picture his book paints is more terrifying than amusing. According to Stewart, the upper echelons of politics are largely made up of empty careerists working within a broken system in a declining country.
One of the most frustrating qualities of current British politics is its deep-rooted parochialism. Conservative politicians who harp on about “global Britain” often have little real interest in the rest of the world. But Stewart, who has lived and worked in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Indonesia, the Balkans and the United States, was an honorable exception, ultimately cast aside by the system.
In the United States, Stewart was a fellow at Yale University; one of his colleagues was Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history. I picked up Mohn’s new book, Liberalism against itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Era (Yale University Press, £20/$27.50), with a certain foreboding, looking forward to encountering a dry book on political theory. Instead, I found myself quickly drawn into the fascinating and combative intellectual history of what Moyn calls “Cold War liberalism.”
He took an iconoclastic approach to revered figures such as Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt. In Moyn’s view, the Cold War made these thinkers so hostile to Marxist utopianism that they abandoned the ideas of social progress and emancipation that had been so central to the liberal tradition. As a result, they turned liberalism into something indistinguishable from conservatism.
In Moyn’s view, this wrong turn in the liberal tradition helps explain our current political predicament. These Cold War liberals left behind a creed that “millennials and post-millennials are more concerned about economic inequality, endless wars and environmental disasters than enemies abroad.”
Moyn’s effort to transform the pantheon of liberal heroes into something closer to a rogues’ gallery makes his book a fascinating read. But, by the end, I was uncomfortably aware that I was a “Cold War liberal.” Unlike Moyn, I still consider the fall of communism in 1989 to be a decisive moment that vindicated many of the arguments put forward over decades by the likes of Popper and Berlin.
As Moyn suggests, the core freedoms they defend are not narrow and anachronistic issues. Free speech and democratic elections are facing growing threats around the world, including in the United States. The possibility that Donald Trump might return to the White House has Moyn boldly lamenting the dangers of political freedoms once again “exaggerating the risks.”
Yale professors’ freedoms may remain even if Trump is re-elected as president. However, on a global level, Mohn’s suggestion that “class, race and gender oppression makes it increasingly unclear why this happens” seems short-sighted. this Liberalism is worth defending.” In Russia, China, Turkey and elsewhere, people have been jailed for defending freedoms that Moyn finds uninspiring.
The people of Ukraine certainly don’t wonder whether global warming or economic inequality will invalidate their struggle.Andrew Harding’s A stubborn town: life, death and resistance in Ukraine (Ithaka (£12.99) is a short but brilliant book about the fighting in Voznesensk, a small Ukrainian community, telling the stories of ordinary people caught up in the war.
Its characters look like they’ve stepped out of a novel. Valentyn trades his lawyer’s office for a trench and an AK-47; Svetlana is a grandmother who was devastated when the Russians turned her hut into their headquarters Anger; Igor, a Russian military officer originally from Ukraine. BBC journalist Harding captures the courage, confusion and fanaticism of Ukrainians who decided to resist the invasion.
Reading Stewart’s or Moyn’s criticisms, we might conclude that Western political institutions are so broken that they are hardly worth defending. Hardin’s narrative is an encouraging and necessary corrective to this weariness.
Gideon Rahman is the chief diplomatic commentator of the Financial Times
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