Renegade Tories choose principle over Brexit chaos

Rory Stewart, the British Conservative cabinet minister, was attending a ceremony in London honouring him as Politician of the Year. There he learned, without ceremony, that he was no longer a Conservative, and after the next election, he may no longer be a politician at all.

Stewart, you see, opposed a no-deal Brexit pursued by Boris Johnson. He was one of the 21 Conservatives who voted against it in Westminster. That did it. He was informed — by text, no less — that he had been expelled from caucus and may not run as a Conservative in his constituency in northern England.

This was the price of stopping his country from crashing out of the European Union on Oct. 31, as Johnson is ready to do. Stewart thinks that’s madness. Now, because of Stewart and his fellow travellers who have denied Johnson a majority, the deadline has been extended.

Stewart is a polymath — a graduate of Eton and Oxford, a former diplomat, administrator and soldier. He is an adventurer, iconoclast and author of bestselling books, including the sensational The Places in Between, his account of walking across Afghanistan in 2002.

At 46, he has had several lives. He is witty, fearless, literary, eloquent and statutorily eccentric, as only Britons can be. Who else could give an acclaimed speech to Parliament on the hedgehog?

He is also rumpled, funny, toothy and personable (we’ve talked a few times). He has held several portfolios in the tiered British cabinet, including international development, environment and prisons. Up to last week, he was government whip.

Now he is out. He could stand as an Independent, and the Liberal Democrats — Britain’s centrist alternative offering a return to sanity — are considering not running candidates against him and other dissenting Conservatives.

What is important here is that Stewart and his political co-religionists had the guts to challenge Johnson, at great political cost. Some may be re-elected as Independents or Liberal Democrats. But for now, they are Conservatives without a party.

Stewart’s constituency voted 55 per cent to leave the EU in the referendum in 2016. He opposed Brexit in that referendum but supported Theresa May’s subsequent efforts to get a deal with Brussels. Now he seems resigned to Britain’s leaving, but he wants a moderate, middle way, which means departing with a plan.

This position will not win over the Remainers, who want a second referendum to reverse the illegitimate first one. They argue that the first referendum campaign was tainted by lies. Britons never knew the terms of departure, let alone its economic consequences. Stewart, who ran for the Tory leadership against Johnson earlier this year, now challenges that thinking, even questioning the ability of Britain to remain in the EU.

Still, Stewart and the other Conservative dissenters show an independence unusual, if unknown, in politics today. They are the resistance in a world of collaborators, personified by Republicans in the United States.

There, we know, the Vichy Republicans have folded under the clenched fist of Donald Trump. They have abandoned deep-seated positions on Russia, human rights and the national debt. Even those who left Congress are afraid to criticize the president.

Prominent Republicans — including the late George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — refused, or refuse, to take him on. Former cabinet secretaries — such as Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson — still won’t denounce Trump even as they doubt, sotto voce, his intelligence, competence and stability.

Only minor Republicans are taking on the president. These include Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan, who has left the party, and Representative Mark Sanford, who will oppose Trump in the primaries.

In 1968, angered by the Vietnam War, Eugene Mccarthy and Robert Kennedy challenged Lyndon Johnson and forced his surprising departure.

Among the luminaries of the Republican Party, where Trump has overwhelming support, this is heresy, or worse, lese-majeste.

But not for Rory Stewart and his renegade Tories. Unlike the cowardly Republicans, they have conscience, conviction and uncommon courage.