Stoking rage is a route to humiliation

THESE are times of great peril for our country and for my party.

They are also painful ones for those of us who believe in the politics of harmony, of caring for and respecting all our people, and of trying to bring them together and not to divide them.

My family have a long story of service to our country. My grandfather, Winston Churchill, led the Government through Britain’s darkest hours – seeing that in a time of crisis the only route to success is for the nation to be told the truth and meet a great challenge together.

We need leadership to put aside anger and division and pull together. We must find a credible route through Brexit to build a better country and go forward together.

Inside the Conservative Party, which I have served as an MP for 35 years, some make a different case, that the answer is to stoke rage by promising an ever-more extreme and irrational response. This is madness, not leadership. It is a route to defeat and national humiliation.

To talk of coming together is not weak. To engage all sides of Parliament in a common national cause is not unpatriotic. To work for the good of our country is not a shallow thing. It is the essential element that makes our country exceptional.

It means choosing a leader who offers more than the short-lived sugar-rush of empty thoughts and ill-informed and, in some cases, dishonest slogans.

Some say we can leave the EU without a deal. But this would be the greatest insult to the wisdom and understanding of the British people. They don’t want a leader who offers to ruin our country. They want one to lead it.

Easy lies and false simplicities got us into this mess. They will emphatically get us out of it.

We need someone with backbone and experience beyond politics and journalism – the Westminster bubble in which Nigel Farage is most at home. We need to beat him, the Liberal Democrats and Jeremy Corbyn’s Marxist wreck of a Labour Party by being better than them. Not by being afraid or deluding people.

In my years in public life (as a Privy Counsellor and officer in the British Army) and learning from my father and grandfather, I hope I have acquired a sense of the real tests of leadership.

Of those who have put their name forward, I can see only one person who can sort out Brexit, unite our party and restore pride and hope to Britain.

That person is Rory Stewart. I am honoured to support him.