Rory Stewart - Antidemocrat

Just when I thought I was fairly well acquainted with the liggers on the green benches, up pops one I’ve never noticed before. Commentators use terms such as ‘original’ ‘different’ or ‘out of the box’ to describe Rory Stewart (Eton and Balliol), the son of a successful spy, when what they mean is a weird but ruthless narcissist so deeply in love with himself he’s lost touch with reality. Tory leadership elections are also opportunities to judge politicians we never want in positions of responsibility, and for me, Stewart is firmly in that small and exclusive cohort.

The Guardian reports on Stewarts latest inanity –

Instead he hopes to deliver Brexit via a citizens’ assembly, which he said he would convene on day one of entering No 10 and would pay a jury of 500 UK citizens to work a seven-day week to find a Brexit consensus that parliament would respect.

Citizens’ assemblies, a process also known as Sortition, are a favourite of the anti-democrats who cried in frustration in 2016 that the ‘wrong sort of people are using democracy’. We only voted for Brexit because we’re not as clever as Rory, apparently. Clearly, we’re wrong. All we need – 500 of us, picked at random – is to be locked up together and lectured by experts until we reach a consensus, which will be, effectively, to cancel Brexit. Problem solved.

As an absolute Baldrick of an idea, it has few equals. A suggestion so utterly, risibly stupid that only an extremely clever moron could have thought of it.

Sortition does have a role.  For stuff like the council’s new masterplan for the High Street, as part of the consultation process before it goes to the planning committee. Where it has absolutely no place is in replacing universal suffrage and the secret ballot in matters of constitutional significance, for which a truly democratic referendum has already given Stewart and his chums in the Commons a clear and unambiguous instruction. If he doesn’t like it, I suggest he either resigns his seat or joins the CUKs.

Citizens assemblies and other varieties of sortition are increasingly a favourite of the anti-democrats who fear that we, via the ballot box, may displace them from their capture of the State. That a champion of such anti-democracy seriously imagines that Conservatives will vote for him as leader displays a greater than usual self-delusion.