Politics on the Edge

**Named a Best Book of the Year by <Foreign Affairs<, <Financial Times<,< <and <Kirkus Reviews<

The #1 Sunday Times bestseller, published in the UK as <Politics on the Edge.

<&ldquo;One of the best books on politics our era will see . . . A book of astonishing literary quality.&rdquo; <&mdash;<Matthew Parris,< <The TLS<<

&ldquo;[Rory Stewart] walked across Asia, served in British Parliament, and ran against Boris Johnson. Now he gives us his view of what&rsquo;s wrong with politics, and how we can make it right.&rdquo; &mdash;Adam Grant, &ldquo;The 12 New Fall Books to Enrich Your Thinking&rdquo;

From a great writer&mdash;legendary for his expeditions into some of the world&rsquo;s most forbidding places&mdash;a wise, honest, and sometimes absurdist memoir of a most remarkable journey through British politics at the breaking point**

Rory Stewart was an unlikely politician. He was best known for his two-year walk across Asia&mdash;in which he crossed Afghanistan, essentially solo, in the months after 9/11&mdash;and for his service, as a diplomat in Iraq, and Afghanistan. But in 2009, he abandoned his chair at Harvard University to stand for a seat in Parliament, representing the communities and farms of the Lake District and the Scottish border&mdash;one of the most isolated and beautiful districts in England. He ran as a Conservative, though he had no prior connection to the politics and there was much about the party that he disagreed with.
<
How Not to Be a Politician< is a candid and penetrating examination of life on the ground as a politician in an age of shallow populism, when every hard problem has a solution that&rsquo;s simple, appealing, and wrong. While undauntedly optimistic about what a public servant can accomplish in the lives of his constituents, the book is also a pitiless insider&rsquo;s expos&eacute; of the game of politics at the highest level, often shocking in its displays of rampant cynicism, ignorance, glibness, and sheer incompetence. Stewart witnesses Britain&rsquo;s vote to leave the European Union and its descent into political civil war, compounded by the bad faith of his party&rsquo;s leaders&mdash;David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss.

Finally, after nine years of service and six ministerial roles, and shocked by his party&rsquo;s lurch to the populist right, Stewart ran for prime minister. Stewart&rsquo;s campaign took him into the lead in the opinion polls, head-to-head against Boris Johnson. <How Not to Be a Politician< is his effort to make sense of it all, including what has happened to politics in Britain and the world and how we can fix it. The view into democracy&rsquo;s dark heart is troubling, but at every turn Stewart also finds allies and ways to make a difference. A bracing, invigorating mix of irony and love infuses <How Not to Be a Politician<. This is one of the most revealing memoirs written by a politician in living memory....