Owen Matthews: If the Tory Party is to stay relevant, people like Rory Stewart should never be allowed to stand for it

Owen Matthews works in political risk insurance and is treasurer of the Queen’s Park and Maida Vale Conservative Association. 

As I sat listening to the latest episode of The Rest is Politics, (I know – I don’t know why I do it to myself either) I felt my blood pressure begin to rise.

Rory Stewart, the man who once had the temerity to call himself a Conservative MP, was at it again.

When his chum and fellow podcaster, Alistair Campbell pressed him on whether he’d prefer to see Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister, Stewart squirmed, declared it “a pretty horrible choice” before admitting “probably narrowly [he’d] go with Corbyn”.

Corbyn!?

The Marxist Magic Grandpa who’d nationalise your local corner shop, cosy up to every dictator going, and turn Britain into a socialist basket case. Over Farage, the man who, whatever you think of him, speaks for millions who value borders, individual liberty, and a Britain that stands tall.

I nearly threw my phone across the room.

Stewart’s not just a fraud; he’s a walking betrayal of everything the Tory Party should stand for, prancing about in his ridiculous Schöffel tweed waistcoats and crumpled linen shirts like some posh geography master on an extended gap year, forever trying to sell his faux-rustic authenticity. If we’re to claw our way back from irrelevance, we must never, ever let his ilk stand as Conservatives again.

This latest revelation wasn’t simply a podcast gaffe.

It was Stewart peeling off the last remnants of a mask he’s worn for years.

His chummy rapport with Campbell – Blair’s spin-doctor-in-chief – makes my skin crawl. The way he nods along each week, practically purring as Campbell waxes lyrical about the EU or the “good old days” of liberal interventionism, is nauseating. They’re two peas in a pod, basking in their self-righteous centrism at sold-out O2 shows, where up to 13,000 middle-class ‘Centrist Dads’ lap up their sanctimonious drivel (even the i-newspaper called it a “middle-class cult”).

The Times christened the duo an “unlikely bromance,” but there’s nothing unlikely about it, they’re both globalist elitists who think they know better than the rest of us. Every episode, Stewart fawns over Campbell’s ‘insights’, barely challenging his pro-EU, open borders, anti-Brexit bile. It’s not debate or even ‘disagreeing agreeably’ as Campbell puts it; it’s an unabashed love-in, and it proves Stewart’s heart lies with the Lib Dems, not the Tories.

His Corbyn-over-Farage nonsense is just the latest proof he was never one of us.

Brexit? He voted Remain, then spent years trying to undermine the result. He pushed Theresa May’s wretched deal as a “compromise,” all while sneering at the idea of a clean break.

Stewart wrote in The Guardian that Boris and Brexit were mere “symptoms” of political decay – barely masking his contempt for the people’s choice. And don’t get me started on his memoir, Politics on the Edge, where he refers to his Tory colleagues as “grotesquely unqualified” and admits feeling like a “fraud” as an MP.  At the Hay Festival last year, he whined that his time in government was “very, very unpleasant” Why? Well obviously, because the party wasn’t liberal enough for his tastes. In 2022 he even told the New Statesman, “I often spend my time sounding like a Lib Dem”. No kidding, Rory.

His obsessions with proportional representation, compulsory voting, and ‘citizens’ assemblies’ – all straight out of the Lib Dem playbook – cements it.

Kicked out of the party in 2019 for rebelling against no-deal, he ran for London mayor as an independent, chasing green and liberal votes.

This is a man who served as a government minister under the Tories, yet week in, week out appears virtually hand-in-hand with Campbell, sniping at the party that gave him a career. On X, at least most people see through him calling him a Lib-Dem infiltrator who wormed his way in for power, not principle.

The Tory Party’s been reduced to a shadow of its former self partly because we let people like Stewart dilute its soul.

Dominic Cummings has the right diagnosis: the party’s been hollowed out by a ‘political class’ crisis, overrun by centrists with bog-standard, low-IQ ideas who’ve betrayed voters’ trust. He’s spot-on that Stewart’s type of politics – wet, elitist and obsessed by ‘consensus’ – drove the party into irrelevance.

Stewart’s globalism, from his unalloyed Remainiac stance to his love for Foreign Aid and soft internationalism, mirrors the very establishment rot Cummings rails against – a rot now festering under Labour’s clueless regime. However, I part ways with Cumming’s apocalyptic call to “plough the Tories into the earth with salt” and start anew. The party can be saved: not by destruction but by unity of vision and clarity of purpose, pulling in the same direction behind low taxes, secure borders and national pride.

I’m not saying we need to roll out the red carpet for Farage either – his rhetoric can divide as much as it unites – but we must squarely reject the liberal globalism Stewart and his Campbell-worshipping ilk represent.

They turned us into New Labour Lite, helping lose us the Red Wall and the trust of voters who want a party that actually believes in Britain.

Listening to Stewart’s sanctimonious drivel, I’m furious we ever let him wear the blue rosette.

A revitalised Tory Party requires us to rally together behind core Conservative values: family, free markets, strong borders, and cultural confidence. No more entryists like Stewart, with his Oxford don airs and liberal lollygagging. If we let his kind back in, we’ll be doomed to oblivion.

The party of Thatcher and Churchill deserves better than this tweedy turncoat.

Never again.