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Rory Stewart leaves Tory party to run for London mayor Rory Stewart quits Conservatives to run for London mayoralty
(about 8 hours later)
The former Conservative leadership candidate Rory Stewart has resigned from the party, and announced plans to run for mayor of London as an independent. The former Tory MP Rory Stewart has announced he will run for the London mayoralty as an independent candidate, after resigning from the Conservative party and standing down from his Penrith and The Border seat at the next election.
Stewart, who was among 21 Tories who lost the whip for rebelling over a no-deal Brexit, announced in a tweet on Friday that he would stand down as an MP. He later told the Evening Standard newspaper he was sick of the “madhouse of mutual insults in the Gothic shouting chamber of Westminster”. The former secretary of state for international development surprised political circles and his Cumbrian constituents with the announcement, made just three months after his bid to become leader of the Conservatives.
Stewart effectively announced his departure as an MP in front of an audience of thousands on Thursday night, during an event at the Royal Albert Hall in London where actors and others read famous letters to the audience. Last month he was kicked out of the parliamentary Tory party alongside 20 other rebels for voting against the government and in favour of the Benn act which blocks a no-deal Brexit and obliging the prime minister to request an extension to article 50.
Coming on stage to read a letter from Eton about the then-schoolboy Boris Johnson, sent to his father, Stanley, Stewart began: “This letter constitutes my resignation from the Conservative party.” Stewart’s announcement came just six days after he tweeted that his only priority in politics was avoiding a no-deal Brexit, and that “the only thing I am launching next week is my four-year-old’s model boat”.
While it was not immediately clear if his comments should be taken seriously, on Friday morning Stewart tweeted: “It’s been a great privilege to serve Penrith and the Border for the last 10 years, so it is with sadness that I am announcing that I will be standing down at the next election, and that I have also resigned from the Conservative party.” Stewart, who campaigned for remain in the 2016 referendum, had also previously had to deny that he would defect to the Liberal Democrats amid significant speculation over how he might approach another general election after being barred from running as a Tory.
In a column for his local newspaper, the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald, Stewart said he would stay involved in politics, albeit outside parliament. He has been linked to rumours about potentially forming a new centrist grouping. In an open letter to Londoners, published in the Evening Standard, Stewart wrote that he was running for mayor to try and eradicate “the suffocating embrace of our dying party politics”.
Stewart wrote that he had considered standing as an independent but had “decided that I wouldn’t want to run against those Conservative members who have been such wonderful colleagues over the last 10 years”. He said political leaders had “retreated to a madhouse of mutual insults in the Gothic shouting chamber of Westminster, pitting one group against another – rich against poor, London against the rest, Brexit against remain – and all the time getting further and further away from compromise, practical solutions, and the centre ground.
“As for the future – I am a public servant to my core and will stay involved in politics, endeavouring to make my voice heard. I will, of course, continue to explain why I voted for a Brexit deal, while rejecting a no-deal Brexit. “And this is why I’ve decided to stand, not for a party, but as an independent.”
“But ultimately I want to move beyond Brexit, and focus on getting things done on the ground. I think our great parties are now in danger of coming apart, and our great parliament is becoming increasingly diminished. I want to show how much difference can still be made outside parliament. So I hope to start work in another part of the country.”
Stewart’s former colleague Amber Rudd, who recently quit the cabinet and resigned the Conservative whip, tweeted: “What a loss to politics. An outstanding MP and minister. One of the strongest speakers in parliament. Principled, patient, thoughtful. I feel certain he’ll be back.”
Robert Craig, the president of Stewart’s local Conservative association in Penrith and the Border, praised the MP and criticised Johnson for taking the party in an “extreme” direction.
I am running as an Independent candidate for Mayor of London, and here’s why.Please join me in my campaign: https://t.co/8y3xWpl9hY#Rory4London pic.twitter.com/jnaNy8IF0sI am running as an Independent candidate for Mayor of London, and here’s why.Please join me in my campaign: https://t.co/8y3xWpl9hY#Rory4London pic.twitter.com/jnaNy8IF0s
Craig told PA Media: “He was really popular and a great, inspirational MP, who appealed to a lot of people who wouldn’t have got involved in the Conservative party locally. In itself it is really sad because quite a lot of us are really quite fed up with where this situation has got now.” Colleagues said his departure could be a huge loss to politics in Westminster. Amber Rudd, the former works and pensions secretary who has also quit the Tories, described him as “principled”. Former Tory minister Sam Gyimah, who has joined the Lib Dems, said Stewart’s departure showed there was no longer a place for moderate one-nation Conservatives within Tory ranks.
At the Letters Live event, Stewart read extracts from a 1982 letter to Johnson’s father, Stanley, from his teacher Martin Hammond. “Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies,” the letter begins. The 46-year-old Eton and Oxford educated Scot served as deputy governor of two provinces in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, and is well known for walking across Afghanistan, documented in his best-selling book The Places in Between.
Appearing on a bill that also featured the actors Olivia Colman, Jude Law and Benedict Cumberbatch, Stewart read: “Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.” In government he served as a minister for Defra with responsibility for flood response, a foreign office minister and prisons minister before being promoted to secretary of state for international development.
Stewart, a former cabinet minister, made an outsider run for the party leadership against Johnson earlier this year that ultimately fell well short of success but catapulted him to public prominence. His approach to the Conservative leadership contest, which involved walking the length and breadth of the country to meet the public, taking awkward selfies and using the hashtag #RoryWalks, electrified the early weeks of the campaign. However, he was knocked out in the third round.
He had already hinted he might leave the party in the weeks since he lost the whip, as a result of rebelling against the government to oppose a no-deal Brexit in a crucial House of Commons vote. While that step pushed him and others, including Philip Hammond and Ken Clarke, out of the parliamentary grouping and seemed likely to mean their future deselection as Conservative candidates, it did not mean they were automatically kicked out of the national party. Stewart drew praise for shaking up the party’s image and broadening its appeal to non-Tory voters. Among his media-friendly moves was holding a campaign event in a circus tent.
Speaking at the GQ Awards in September, Stewart said: “You’ve made me politician of the year and I’m no longer a politician.” He chose the Royal Albert Hall in London to effectively announce his departure as a Cumbrian MP at an event where famous letters are read to an audience.
At a philosophy and music festival, he told the audience that if Johnson succeeded in taking the UK out of the EU this month he would resign. Coming on stage to read a letter from Eton about the then-schoolboy Boris Johnson, sent to his father, Stanley, Stewart told the audience of thousands: “This letter constitutes my resignation from the Conservative party.”
“It would be the end of my political project.” While it was not immediately clear whether his comments should be taken seriously, on Friday morning he tweeted: “It’s been a great privilege to serve Penrith and The Border for the last 10 years, so it is with sadness that I am announcing that I will be standing down at the next election, and that I have also resigned from the Conservative party.”
He timed his announcement to fit in with the print deadline for his local paper, the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald, based in Penrith, writing how “so much of what I love about Britain lies in Cumbria”.
Just 14 minutes after his 10.30am announcement with his local paper, Stewart revealed his intention to run as mayor of London, leaving local reporters scrambling before their deadline.
Rory Stewart: ‘If Boris Johnson gets a deal, my political career is over’
Images on his website were swiftly changed from fields of animals to the London skyline.
Some local Conservatives and constituents were said to be disappointed at his move but understood his decision, with many paying tribute to Stewart’s service to the constituency, understanding of the farming community, leading a campaign for rural broadband and his work in the aftermath of Storm Desmond.
Stewart had hinted that some in his local association did not want him to run again in the next election, expected to be held this autumn.
The fformer Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, whose constituency Westmorland and Lonsdale abuts Stewart’s, said: “I’m not surprised really but I am very sad for him … I don’t agree with him on a few things but he is very dedicated to public service and he just feels that the future of the party that he has been in doesn’t provide a home for him.
“I think there was a reasonable chance he could have won Penrith and The Border – he was a very respected local MP. A lot of people not of his political colours voted for him. People were proud of him and that he was their MP.”
Farron said he did not expect Stewart would win the London mayoralty against Labour’s Sadiq Khan, as he may end up splitting the vote from the Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, and the Lib Dem candidate, Siobhan Benita.
The bookmaker Coral said that after a flurry of bets the odds on Stewart becoming mayor were as short as 2-1.
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