Politics On the Edge: The instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller from the host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics

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A superbly readable book. Former Tory minister Rory Stewart exposes the ‘shameful state’ of recent Conservative rule in this brilliant and blisteringly frank account of dysfunctional government Luke Harding, Observer Yes, Rory?” she said again, and she suddenly swung away, letting me into another absurdly grand space with floral carvings running over the pale wooden walls: this I suspected had been the boardroom of the Liberal MP and minister Alfred Mond, who had financed this building, while my room had once been his private office. He did it best as prisons minister, inheriting a situation where 85,000 convicts were being jammed into 65,000 prison places and where, perversely, a third of prison officers had been sacrificed to austerity. Violence was rife, fuelled by drugs. He knew that access to them was 30 times higher in jails here than in Sweden. With support from his boss, David Gauke, he drew up a programme to fix the broken windows through which drone-delivered drugs arrived regularly, installing scanners, improving search procedures and setting clearer standards.

A searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament from Rory Stewart, former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of breakout hit podcast The Rest Is Politics 'An instant classic' MARINA HYDE This is a book full of fascination but, ultimately it’s a study in pain – the scarring effect of disillusion. If you can bear it, have a listen to this:

Disillusionment was swift. MPs were uninterested in policy, he discovered. Instead they were obsessed with scandal. He found “impotence, suspicion, envy, resentment, claustrophobia and Schadenfreude”. Cameron made speeches about diversity. But he filled his private office with white-shirted old Etonians, drawn “from an unimaginably narrow social group”. In one vote Stewart rebelled over an amendment on mountain rescue by hiding in the loo. No one noticed. An eye-opening (and highly enjoyable) read for anyone interested in understanding the realities of political power in the age of populism Yuval Noah Harari, author of SAPIENS

However, in doing so, Stewart does not appear self-serving or egotistical. Instead, Stewart appears introspective, transparent and articulate in his self-reflection, recognising that he made mistakes and that he could have done things differently. This enables Politics on the Edge to read in an enthralling manner and to be void of unwarranted self-promotion, unlike certain other memoirs. When the results came in, I had won a record majority. We increased the vote across Cumbria and indeed across the country. Our Lib Dem coalition partners were wiped out, dropping from 57 seats to eight. Labour lost every seat in Scotland to the Scottish Nationalists – ending a century of domination in the north. The old two-and-a-half-party system seemed to be over. How much of this was due to Jim Messina and his digital campaign, and how much to the promise of a Brexit referendum, was unclear. Each MP attributed our success to our own ability, charisma and dedication to our seat. But political scientists insisted that it had been a national swing and the character of the individual MP made very little difference to the vote. Except the first door to which the computer directed us had a Labour poster in its window. The next target had been rented out as a student squat. We passed a house which the councillor said, morosely, contained Conservative voters, but which the software had failed to identify. It had taken me nine hours to get to Cheltenham from Cumbria. In three hours of campaigning we found only one potential Conservative voter. We reported this name to the campaign headquarters – now filled with Grant Shapps’s young activists apparently readying for the post-battle bus party.I paused, looking at the four junior officials who formed my inner team: each with neat clothes, neat smiles and even neater files: as crisp as the lime-wood carving on the walls. They were all I guessed in their twenties – Tom looked as though he had only just left university.

Come on Rory, I can write it myself already. Do you want me to give you some clues? Point one, connect young people with nature; point two, apprenticeships; point three, health and well-being… Make it eight points, if you can’t find 10. But ten is better.” And again she smiled, as though she were testing me. Not a very good time to keep your phone off is it? The prime minister wants to see you in 20 minutes.” Three women (Jo, Liz and Suzie) and one man (Tom) asked if they could sit down at the table. “We are your private office, Minister,” they said, in the tone of a concierge team at an expensive hotel. They explained that the department consisted of three ministers – Liz Truss was the Secretary of State and my boss. The Minister of State, the second most senior minister, had been given the portfolio for “food” – which meant farming. I, as the parliamentary undersecretary, had been allocated the “environment and rural affairs” brief. So well and often so wittily written, and so revealing about British politics from top to bottom, that it is destined to become a classic of the genre Literary ReviewAnyone with the slightest interest in politics should get a copy of Rory Stewart's political memoir... In terms of the quality of writing, there has been nothing to approach it since the diaries of Alan Clark Dominic Lawson, Daily Mail And data, Rory. Defra is the most data-rich department in Whitehall, with much of it – millions and millions of files – worth billions of pounds. Think of the possibilities: 8,000 sets of data, we will use LIDAR data,” she said. I nodded although I could only guess that this was an acronym for some type of imaging system. “It can pinpoint which places have the best soil and microclimates to grow grapes for English sparkling wine, isn’t that right?” she challenged her private secretary.