AMERICAN CLIMATE COMMUNICATORS MIGHT LEARN A THING OR TWO FROM BRITAIN'S CURRENT PM CAMPAIGN
"I was peripherally involved in Stewart’s leadership campaign, helping to organise some of his Northern Ireland visit, including a trip to my home county (and Britain’s true Lake District) Fermanagh.
Here Stewart shone as the man who invented ‘slow politics’ – an interest in the lives of people for whom Westminster’s carnival of narcissism is a frenetic, peripheral and alienating experience. I put him together with farmers worried about the consequences, from tariffs to animal welfare, of a no-deal Brexit. He listened with humility and spoke with knowledge and empathy. Feedback from my normally unimpressible contacts was positive. I suspect the value of spending time understanding the lives and aspirations of ordinary people snared in our national psychodrama, while still needing to put bread on the table, will become more not less central to his pitch.
I was put in mind of the value of this calm, measured engagement again last night when I attended the Police Foundation’s Harris Memorial Lecture, delivered by Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick. In a clever discourse on the state of British policing, she identified four main challenges all too familiar to those who want to fix British politics right now: velocity, variety, volume and complexity.
We’ve touched on velocity already. Rory Stewart, in his street encounters with a punch-drunk electorate, has identified a yearning for steadiness, stability, prudence and common sense from the ruling class.
If there was ever any latent admiration for ‘just in time’, shirt untucked, back of an envelope government, it has surely drained away by now. People across the political spectrum have been struck by Stewart’s seriousness of purpose and his refusal to submit to the superficial"
- - Ian Acheson Coffee House column, 26 June 2019
