‘I saw how grotesquely unqualified so many of us were’: Rory Stewart on his decade as a Tory MP

It is December 2015. I am the minister for flooding. (I am also the minister for forestry, for national parks, for nature, for chemicals, for air quality, for waste and recycling, for water and much more than can be written on a business card). I knew almost nothing about any of these topics when, six months earlier, the prime minister, David Cameron, made me minister for these things. It may have been a mistake. In a recent meeting he has given me the impression that he believes I am the minister for agriculture.

Exactly 341mm of rain has fallen in the last 24 hours – the highest rainfall ever recorded in the United Kingdom. More than 60,000 houses in Lancaster have lost power, and the epicentre of the flooding is my own constituency in Cumbria. I have been wading into front rooms, filled with dirty water above the level of the mantle-shelves, their interiors a swirling mess of photo albums and wooden furniture.

Bloated corpses of sheep lie strewn across field edges. Business owners are staring in horror at the destruction of their stockrooms and getting no response from the insurance agencies. My notebook is filled with names and emails and requests from residents. Now it is just after dawn, and I have been dressed in an Environment Agency coat and a hi-vis jacket, and put in front of the television cameras.

My feet are wet and cold because I made the mistake of tucking my waterproof trousers into my wellies. Behind me, in the halogen lights of a winter morning, rescuers in boats are drifting down Warwick Road in Carlisle, lifting families from upstairs windows. Journalists are finding different ways of asking me how I could possibly have allowed this to happen. There are some earnest but imprecise attempts to link the flooding to climate change. Finally, I insist “the flood walls are working well. The only problem is that the water is coming over the top.” This idiotic line is then replayed across all the networks and is selected by Have I Got News for You as one of the political blunders of the year.

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In the flood water in 2015 I felt like a minor player in Yes Minister or – part of an ancient tradition of underqualified and off-balance ministers wrapped in the old consensus of British politics. And, on the surface, the political universe seemed very stable. An election had