Rory Stewart

In short, as a fellow academic who was applying to be a Labour MP observed, I was perhaps if not a Conservative, then at least a Tory.

There was a lull. He gazed like an emperor out of the window, down onto Parliament Square. I explained that I had been a Labour Party member at eighteen but had voted Lib Dem in 1997. ‘Do you think,’ I asked coyly, ‘I should be an MP?’ Now it was his turn to encourage my ambitions and flatter me as I had him. With perhaps as little conviction. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘it is the best, the only, the great game. But for God’s sake don’t become a Lib Dem, the point is to be a minister,’ said the former leader of the Lib Dems. ‘Lib Dems get nothing done.

I was led from the glass terminal into an older building, which had once been a police headquarters. Four men sat in Cameron’s outer office, with floppy hair and open-necked white shirts: speechwriter, head of strategy, chief of staff, chancellor’s chief of staff, all Old Etonians. I knew them because I had also gone to Eton, and I liked some of them. But I was astonished that Cameron could have filled his private office in this way. I employed 300 people in Kabul, including thirty foreigners, and not one had been to my school.

Outside this office, Cameron had launched a campaign to bring in women and people from working-class and minority-ethnic backgrounds to be MPs – people like the British Asian public affairs professional Priti Patel, or the state-educated think-tank director Liz Truss. He would promote them fast so that he could announce, proudly, to the media that his Cabinet was the most diverse in history. Nor did he ever miss a chance to insist that ‘diversity makes government better’. And yet his real inner team, and his closest friends, with whom he developed policy, were drawn from an unimaginably narrow social group

There was now, therefore, a vacancy. But to have a chance of filling it, I would have to pass through half a dozen tests, each controlled by different levels of the national or local Conservative Party. The party had just over 100,000 members nationally: 0.2 per cent of the British population – a catastrophic decline from the 2.5 million members when my mother was a young member.

Then there was Tom Lowther. The Lowthers had been in the Lowther Valley so long that no one knew whether the valley was named for them, or they for the valley, whether they were descended from Viking chiefs, or earlier Iron Age chieftains. Fifty Lowthers had represented the seat since the early Middle Ages. Until the 1980s, all non-Lowther MPs had acknowledged this by marking election day with a champagne breakfast at Lowther Castle and riding to the Penrith count in a Lowther carriage wearing not a blue rosette but a yellow rosette in the Lowther colours. Tom was the grandson of the Lowther earl, and a farmer. He was a Conservative county councillor like his father before him.

I didn’t grasp then quite how lucky I had been. I was lucky that the party was still using the old Civil Service assessment board system: lucky that David Cameron had annoyed someone by trying to block my progress; lucky that he had allowed non-Conservative Party members to vote in the primary. And above all lucky that the expenses scandal had suddenly created, so late in the day, dozens of unexpected vacancies for safe seats, allowing someone like me to move so quickly through the system. Over the following years, almost every one of these loopholes was sealed up, guaranteeing that an increasing number of MPs were party professionals with long years of campaigning and service as local councillors.

I was beginning to feel that this constituency, to which I hoped to be elected, was almost a separate, independent nation. This was the heart of what had once been the independent kingdom of Cumbria – that pre-dated England and Scotland. It had a separate dialect and fragments of a separate language (the sheep-counting numerals used by at least one of the shepherds I knew ran not ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’ but ‘yann’, ‘tann’, ‘tethera’), and its market town had the highest incidence of Viking DNA in the country

A hall lined with wooden cubbyholes, one now marked for me, led through to the new green carpets of the debating chamber. A guide seemed to be telling the visitors in French that the chamber was a 1950s copy of a nineteenth-century reimagining of an eighteenth-century conversion of a late medieval chapel. This seemed to me a good symbol of the blend of the naff, the antique and the pastiche in the British government and constitution.

he seven standards of public life, determined by a committee in 1994 to be Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty and Leadership.

The Pakistani president had assured him that he would be quite willing to address the problem of terrorist safe havens, and rein in the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). Cameron planned to invite both the Pakistani and Afghan presidents to stay, and to convince the latter, who had spent thirty years fighting Pakistani-backed militia, to trust the Pakistanis.