The Telegraph, UK.  Rory Stewart is wrong about everything, but he gets away with it because he is posh. Fans of The Rest is Politics believe the social status of a political opinion matters more than its accordance with reality.

The former Conservative minister’s career is a reminder there is no limit to how wrong you can be as long as you have the right voice.

Stephen Daisley, The Tegraph, UK
10 January 2026 7:02pm GMT

Rory Stewart’s career is a reminder that there is no limit to how wrong you can be, or how often, provided you’re wrong with a posh accent. When Dominic Cummings warned that senior figures in the United Arab Emirates were worried about their children being radicalised at British universities, Stewart was contemptuous on The Rest is Politics, the podcast he co-hosts with Alastair Campbell. 

The former Tory minister complained that “nobody ever holds Cummings accountable or remembers when he bullsh**s”, and claimed the ex-Downing Street adviser liked to “sound confident, create a conspiracy theory, drop names, [and] sound like he’s all across classified information that nobody else knows about”. 

With an inevitability that will be all-too-familiar to followers of Stewart’s political analysis, it has now been reported that the UAE is removing British universities from its overseas tuition support programme. 

Goodness, why would they do that? Could it be…? Yes, it could: the Emiratis fear their next generation of leaders and public servants could be radicalised if they are exposed to the UK’s Islamist-friendly campuses. 

Britain is so tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism that actual Islamic nations want to keep their kids away. That should send alarm bells blaring throughout Whitehall, and the rest of the country for that matter.

But let’s not forget Stewart, the Mystic Meg of the Middle East. What was it he called Cummings’ claim? A “conspiracy theory” that posed as “classified information”?

Of course, you needn’t be a conspiracy theorist or have access to classified information to know that the Emiratis have been concerned about the rise of Islamism in Britain for some time now. They crack down on Islamist groups at home and want the UK Government to do the same. 

It is a matter of record that the UAE has lobbied Westminster to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood, and it has been widely reported that they were dismayed by Keir Starmer’s failure to do so. Stewart would have known this too, if only he had got his hands on classified information. Or a “newspaper”, as it’s otherwise known. 

Or maybe he was aware, and just didn’t want it to be true. Couldn’t bear it to be true. Desperately needed it to be a far-Right talking point or misinformation from X or any of the other political bogeymen establishment figures invoke to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths. 

Uncomfortable because they belie the progressive mythos in which multiculturalism has been an overwhelming success story, mass immigration has contributed only much-needed skills and cultural enrichment, and diversity is our strength. 

Stewart dismissed Cummings’ story for the same reason that other nervy lieutenants of the crumbling old guard were happy to accept that Israeli football fans would be the cause of trouble if a large number of Jews arrived in Birmingham; became apoplectic when Robert Jenrick pointed out the radical demographic change that city has undergone; and said nary a word about Pakistani-heritage rape gangs targeting white British girls until Elon Musk tweeted about it – and only then to condemn Musk for being inflammatory. 

Avoidance of the day-to-day reality of multicultural, mass immigration Britain is the only way to prop up its hollow edifice. Their fear is not that the multicultural experiment has failed with disastrous consequences for the country – they plainly don’t care about that – but that conceding failure hands a moral victory to the Right and other critics of open borders. 

In the mind of the middle-class midwit, the world is divided into Good People, who believe in Being Kind, and Bad People, who say bigoted things because they’ve been brainwashed by Elon Musk and Nigel Farage. 

Policies and outcomes mean nothing. What matters is maintaining their soothing intellectual safe space in which the Good People are always right and the Bad People are Russian bots. 

It doesn’t concern them that the United Arab Emirates sees Britain’s approach to Islamism as dangerously complacent. They are captive to an ideological neo-feudalism in which the social status of political opinions matters more than their accordance with observable reality. 

The next time a concert venue blows up or a jihadist goes on a knife spree, these intellectual serfs will just download The Rest is Politics emergency podcast for some genteel reassurance from Rory Stewart, a man who is wrong about everything but is so exquisitely plummy that it must be that the facts that are wrong.

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See also: The Pied Pipers of the Liberal World Order