Rory Stewart
Rory Stewart
Roderick James Nugent 'Rory' Stewart, OBE, FRSLis a British academic, author, diplomat, documentary maker and Conservative politician currently serving as a Minister of State at the Department for International Development. He is a former Chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. Since May 2010, he has been the Member of Parliament for Penrith and The Border, in the county of Cumbria, North West England...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth3 January 1973
adult change life overseas possibilities purposeful question sort
I don't know much about Britain. I've been working overseas for most of my adult life. So I'd like to see what sort of problems there really are here. It's a question of asking, 'Where are we going, how purposeful are we?' And see if there's anything that can be done to find possibilities for change.
governs met remote
I have not met, in Afghanistan, in even the most remote community, anybody who does not want a say in who governs them. Most remote community, I have never met a villager who does not want a vote.
bothered kid local million people room run sure took village
I have a constituency with 52,000 people and a million sheep. I was in one village where a local kid was run over by a tractor. They took him to Carlisle, but they couldn't be bothered to wait at the hospital. So they put him in a darkened room for two weeks, then said he was fine. But I'm not so sure he was.
diminished elitist fantasies freed heroes itself produced risked september tamed
September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism... But in so doing, we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves.
bamboo hiking posted sandwiches
When my father was posted to Malaysia, we'd take bacon-and-egg sandwiches in our backpacks and go hiking in the jungle or make bamboo rafts to sail down rivers.
afghans assume based best country envies everybody people strange sympathy towards
As a Scot, I instinctively feel a sympathy towards a culture which is based on generosity. It's very refreshing. Afghans think they're the best people in the world and their country is the best place in the world, and it's strange because you go there and it doesn't really look like it, and yet they assume that everybody else envies them.
coming frank life maybe odd people public quite seem
I think one of the odd things about public life, coming from the outside, is that people seem to be paranoid. Maybe they were quite frank initially, but then they did one thing which went wrong.
democracy dignity equality government individual matters reflects
Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government.
connecting connects interested places
I like connecting to places by foot, and I'm interested in experiencing how somewhere like Crieff connects to somewhere like London.
international-relations interventionism can-do
The question shouldn't be what we ought to do, but what we can do.
democracy politician ifs
If democracy is to be rebuilt … it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public.
scotland leaving magic
I had been walking one afternoon in Scotland and thought: Why don't I just keep going? There was, I said, a magic in leaving a line of footprints stretching across Asia.
mountain seems
Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.