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Some of Rory Stewart’s utterances have prompted an interesting, and alarming, question: is the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Borders really a ‘Conservative’ in any true sense?
This question needs to be asked not because of his Remainer tendencies which, although they put him at odds with the bulk of the party membership, he shares with many others Conservatives.
It is because during the BBC’s televised debate on Tuesday night, he looked dumbfounded by any suggestion of cutting taxes – a central tenet of Toryism – while his absurd suggestion of a
‘People’s Assembly’ to break the parliamentary Brexit deadlock amounts to a radical attack on traditional institutions. So why, then, is such an individual a member of the Conservative
Party, let alone representing it and aspiring to lead it? A clue comes from his personal fascination with the individual he is so closely associated with: TE Lawrence ‘of Arabia’. Stewart’s
fascination with Lawrence has led him to make television programmes about the man and his story, and, in years gone by, he has self-consciously tried to strike a Lawrentian pose: in the
early 2000s, he spent a great deal of time walking through romantic, and dangerous, territory in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Nepal, and writing about his experiences. He is, in the words
of one reviewer, ‘a modern Lawrence of Arabia’. But while much attention has been focused on the self-conscious and well-marketed parallels between Stewart and the wartime exploits of his
illustrious Oxford predecessor, less has been said about what Lawrence did after the First World War. For reasons that remain unclear, Lawrence then disappeared into the ranks of both the
RAF and the Army, using a series of pseudonyms to hide his true identity. The cultured, supremely well-connected and distinguished intellectual was, to state the obvious, radically different
in every respect from those who surrounded him, most of whom (but by no means all) were boorish, coarse cannon-fodder. When you read Lawrence’s account of his time in the RAF, The Mint, or
some of his letters, it may become clear that he saw his experiences as a perverse form of attention-seeking: he liked those around him to ask questions about who their mysterious
fellow-serviceman really was. He deliberately cultivated this sense of mystery, not least by springing surprises on them: for example, he would drive around in a very expensive motorbike
that his counterparts could barely even dream of buying. This was a new game that Lawrence was now playing, after his own involvement in an international Great Game was over. Around Rory
Stewart, too, there is an air of mystery: no one quite knows whether or not he was an MI6 agent, for a start. But more importantly, there is the distinct possibility that, since 2010, he
has also appeared in a place where he least belongs: not the barrack room, but the Conservative Party. And like ‘Aircraftman Shaw’ (among other names that Lawrence used), he then likes to
spring surprises on those around him to seize their attention and make them gasp with wonder – hence the leadership contender who tried so hard to stand out from the other candidates, not
least by removing his tie on live television. So just imagine what might have happened if he had made it to No 10. Just imagine Prime Minister Rory Stewart suddenly stripping off his
disguise as a Conservative and exposing himself as a radical and socialist. He would have exposed himself in these terms with the same glee, and vanity, with which Aircraftman Shaw exposed
himself, to stunned fellow servicemen, as Lawrence of Arabia all those years before.