Alexander the Great, Lawrence of Arabia, Martin Luther King.
With their respective feats in war, diplomacy and civil rights activism, they can all be described as heroes, former Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart says.
But, while speaking to the Mail to promote his new BBC podcast on the ‘long history’ of heroism, Mr Stewart added one more unlikely hero to his list: Theresa May.
Mr Stewart served under the former PM as prisons minister and international development secretary, before Mrs May was forced to resign after repeatedly failing to get her Brexit deal through Parliament.
But, despite her defeats, which also included the loss of her Commons majority in a snap election in 2017, Mr Stewart remains one of her staunch defenders.
He told the Mail: ‘Well of the prime ministers I served with, so out of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, [and] Keir Starmer, [she] would definitely be my hero.’
Mr Stewart, who stepped down as an MP at the 2019 election after losing to Boris Johnson in the race to replace Mrs May as Tory leader and PM, praised his former boss for her ‘incredible sense of dignity’ and for being ‘very serious’.
He also admitted that his opinion of Donald Trump has changed ‘for better and worse’ and described him as ‘the most consequential President of our lifetime’.
Ahead of the US election last November, Mr Stewart said Kamala Harris, Mr Trump’s Democrat rival, would win the keys to the White House ‘comfortably’ and even placed a huge bet backing his prediction.
The politician, who now hosts the popular Rest is Politics podcast with former New Labour spin chief Alastair Campbell, then had to acknowledge he had been ‘completely wrong’ and said it was ‘heartbreaking’ that Mr Trump was to return as US President.
In what was a wide-ranging interview, Mr Stewart also defended wartime PM Winston Churchill, saying he was a ‘profound hero’; said Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is ‘probably more moderate’ than he is given credit for by critics; and likened himself to a ‘fish that is six inches long’.
Mr Stewart’s new podcast, The Long History of Heroism, is set across five episodes.
In the first, which aired on Radio 4 this morning, the politician waxes lyrical about Alexander the Great, who ruled Macedonia in the 4th Century BC and is widely regarded as one of the greatest military leaders in history.
He says: ‘I worshipped Alexander the Great and my fascination with him continued right into my 20s.
‘I walked across what is now Iran, retracing his foot steps; an 18 months walk over 6,000 miles and I ended up where he finished on the edge of India.
‘I stood at the place where he is supposed to have wept when he had no more land to conquer.’
Mr Stewart had an extraordinary career before he entered Parliament in 2010 at the age of 37.
The politician, whose father rose to become senior in intelligence service MI6, served in the British Army before becoming a diplomat and then a successful author.
While working for the Foreign Office, he became a deputy governor of two Iraq provinces when he was only 30.
He later chose to try his hand at politics and became the MP for Penrith and The Border in northern England.
He first served as a junior minister under David Cameron before being promoted under Mrs May.
Speaking to the Mail remotely from his home in Scotland, Mr Stewart recounts how, while snorkelling during a recent family holiday in Colombia, he wondered, ‘what sort of fish am I?’
He eventually concludes: ‘I’m thinking about myself as a fish at about six inches, yeah, six inches long.
It is a good analogy for how far he got in politics compared to fellow ex Etonians and Oxford graduates Lord Cameron and Mr Johnson.
Mr Stewart admits that critics’ view of him as having an almost messianic self-belief is partly correct.
‘I think that’s a perfectly valid criticism of me.
‘I can see why that gets up people’s noses, but it’s but I think I just say in my defence that you’d probably find that almost everybody running to be Prime Minister would have similar views.’
Another figure Mr Stewart adored when he was younger was British army officer T.E. Lawrence, better known by his famous nickname.
He achieved notoriety for having led an Arab revolt against the Turks in the First World War.
But he died in a motorbike accident in 1946, with his dream of Arab independence not having been realised.
‘What I loved about someone like Lawrence is his sense of guilt and pain in later life, that he set off thinking he could be a knight in shining armour and that he could save the Middle East, and it basically broke him.
‘He realized that trying to live out a life as a sort of classical hero in the modern age is impossible.
‘And you end up feeling like a fraud. And so I felt incredible empathy with him.’
Lawrence was, Mr Stewart says, an example of one of the last prominent figures to try to live as a ‘classical hero’.
The past 100 years have been an attempt to ‘replace the hero after the hero has died’.
This has ultimately led to the invention of superheroes and the increasing obsession with celebrities and sport stars, Mr Stewart argues.
One hero to emerge from the 20th century for Mr Stewart is Churchill, who entered Downing Street in 1940 and then led the nation through the rest of the Second World War.
He later became PM for a second time, from 1951 to 1955, after losing the 1945 election.
But Churchill’s vehement views on subjects including Indian independence mean there is plenty of ammunition for his critics.
His statue in Westminster was targeted by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.
‘The worst kind of British nationalism is one that imagines that what made Churchill was just a few kind of off colour remarks and a bit of bluster,’ Mr Stewart says.
‘What made him was the most intense intellectual seriousness and belief in Britain and its mission and incredible, not just physical but moral, courage throughout his career.’
As a result, Churchill was a ‘profound hero’, Mr Stewart adds.
But he also cautions: ‘Now, understanding what a hero is is to understand that they all have incredible flaws.
‘If you go right back to the very beginning of heroes, Achilles is obviously a man with extraordinary flaws, so is Alexander, so is Lawrence, so is Florence Nightingale, so is any of these people.
‘We are human. And we are also citizens of our age and time. If you are born as Churchill was in the late 19th century, you will inherit a lot of views we will find very disturbing today.
‘Racist views, imperialist views, all these kinds of things. But that doesn’t detract in any way from the incredible nature of his insight, courage, seriousness.’
On Mr Farage, who became well-known as leader of UKIP and in his vociferous campaigning to leave the European Union, Mr Stewart is similarly nuanced.
Although he labels the MP an ‘extremely able communicator’, he feels he is lacking a ‘sense of seriousness’.
He says: ‘The whole thing seems to be too much of a game. I’d like to know in the end, what really was his vision for Brexit?
‘I mean, given that that was the biggest thing he did in his life, how was this thing really supposed to play through? What was a good Brexit? What was a bad Brexit?’
But he adds: ‘I’m not one of these people who has nightmares about Farage, I think he’s probably more moderate than people give him credit for being.
‘He would have been on the right of the Tory party I knew.’
So why does he hold Mrs May in such high regard despite her political failures?
‘I really admire Theresa May because I thought she was very serious, and I really valued being in her Cabinet,’ he says.
‘And I thought she had an incredible sense of dignity and a real attempt to do what she thought was the right thing.’
This included her vision of a ‘softer’ Brexit that she believed was in the national interest, Mr Stewart adds.
‘She fought tooth and nail for that, and ultimately sacrificed her political career to try to achieve that.’
But he admits it is ‘really difficult’ to see her as a ‘classical hero’ because she failed to achieve her main aims.
As for the US President, Mr Stewart is humble about what we got wrong.
‘I think my opinion of Trump has definitely changed for for better and worse.
‘I think the Trump we’re seeing now is very different from the Trump in his first term.
He clearly spent that four years really developing a very different idea of what it means to be a president.
‘So he is certainly having a much more found impact on the world than he did first time round, for better and worse.’
Mr Stewart admits he ‘underestimated’ one of Mr Trump’s ‘strengths’, which he argues is his ability to quickly change his mind.
He believes, that, in the coming days, Mr Trump could, ‘go from being a very, very fervent supporter of Israel’s policies in Gaza to changing to being a very fervent supporter of the interests of Palestinians in Gaza.’
The President’s public support for the Israeli government has softened in recent weeks, whilst Mr Trump has also expressed concern about mass hunger in Gaza, saying images of emaciated children in the region showed there was ‘real starvation’.
‘We could well see, over the next week or two, a complete transformation in American policy towards the Middle East, which almost no other president would have been able to do,’ Mr Stewart says.
But the former Tory leadership contender is also fiercely critical of the President, adding: ‘I think in the end, the damage to his allies will be profound.
‘I think that’s the real sadness here, which is that the West, the UK, Europe, Japan, South Korea, these countries that have been American allies since the Second World War have been through this incredible roller coaster with his shift on his policy on Ukraine, his challenges to NATO, his tariffs.
‘This stuff I don’t think America will ever recover from because none of America’s allies will be able to rely on America in the future in the way they did in the past.’
He concludes: ‘He’s the most consequential, interesting president of our lifetime.
‘But I’m afraid he’s also a fundamentally flawed person who in the end history will conclude has done an incredible amount of damage to the global order and to the interest of American allies and democracies and to the global economy.’
Rory Stewart: The Long History of Heroism started today on BBC Sounds and Radio 4.
