The candidate from Kabul

Rory Stewart’s career to date reads like something from the heyday of the empire.

Rory Stewart’s career to date reads like something from the heyday of the empire. Eton and Oxford- educated, he has been a tutor to royalty, an officer in the Black Watch, the deputy governor of an Iraqi province, has founded a charity in Afghanistan and has written two critically acclaimed books as well as walking across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. Now he wants to be a Tory MP.

With Brad Pitt having already bought the movie rights to Stewart’s life story, one would have thought that the Tories would be revelling in their new catch. Style and substance combined: what the modern Tory party so desperately wants. But instead Stewart’s ambitions, announced in an interview in the London Evening Standard that took the party hierarchy by surprise, are causing heartburn.

Stewart believes, and has been all over the media saying, that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and that the British presence there should be substantially reduced; something that is not Tory party policy. To one senior figure in the party’s foreign policy-making process his views are ‘complete folly’ and ‘suicidal’.

David Cameron’s circle worry a lot about maintaining both party and popular support for the effort in Afghanistan — there is considerable concern that David Davis might rock the boat this autumn with a public call for withdrawal — so the prospect of a media-savvy Afghan expert on the Tory backbenches who disagrees with their approach causes alarm. In Stewart, senior aides believe, the Tories could be saddling themselves with another Zac Goldsmith — an evangelist whose views are too strong to abide party discipline.

Stewart’s friends argue that, having served in the military and the diplomatic service, he knows when to bite his tongue.