Underdog gives Tory big beasts a fright in UK leader race

Bloomberg

Rory Stewart, the rank outsider in the contest to become Britain’s next leader, is suddenly winning support and giving his bigger-name rivals a reason to worry.
Officials working for three better-known contenders privately said they believed Stewart could deliver a major upset in the Conservative Party leadership votes this week. His rivals have now begun taking him seriously as a threat.
Stewart is aiming to defy the odds and make it through the voting among Tory members of Parliament on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to a probable head-to-head against Boris Johnson, the favorite, next month.
“He’s the candidate that other candidates fear,” cabinet minister David Gauke, one of Stewart’s earliest backers, said in an interview. “If he gets a chance of being in the final two, he is the candidate who can deliver a big surprise.”
Britain is in the middle of a political crisis after Theresa May was forced to quit as prime minister over her failure to complete the country’s exit from the European Union. The result of the contest will decide what kind of Brexit the UK pursues and shape the country’s political dynamics and economic outlook for years.
Johnson is promising a decisive break from the EU by the October 31 deadline, even without a deal. But Stewart insists the only option for delivering on the 2016 referendum is to ensure May’s unpopular withdrawal agreement — which was defeated three times in Parliament, including once by a record margin — succeeds.
His manifesto is for compromise. He wants to root government in the center-ground of politics, and to be humble enough to accept his limits and tell the truth.
Stewart, the international development secretary, started his campaign with a typically eccentric decision. Instead of trying to win over the electorate that matters in the first stages of the contest — the 313 Tory MPs who will whittle down the crowded field of 10 candidates to two — he walked high streets around Britain to speak directly to voters.
“Theoretically this should be catastrophic for me,” Stewart, 46, told journalists. “Oddly what seems to be happening is that people are refreshed.”
Stewart has criticised the “machismo” of opponents — especially Johnson — who say they can get changes to the Brexit agreement from Brussels, when the EU said it won’t renegotiate. He’s said pursuing a no-deal Brexit is pointless because parliament won’t allow it. And he’s vowed to bring down Johnson if he tries to override MPs to force through an exit without a deal.

‘The Undeliverable’
The tactic is paying off so far. After scraping through the first round of voting among Tory MPs in last place, Stewart picked up new backers, including de-facto deputy prime minister David Lidington, Culture Minister Margot James, and former Cabinet minister Caroline Spelman.
Bookmakers have moved him up from long-shot to a genuine contender to make the final two. One of his backers in Parliament, Antoinette Sandbach, said Stewart has electoral appeal that reaches beyond the Tory core voters.
“Rory recognises that Boris Johnson is promising the undeliverable and says so,” she said in an interview. “People like his straight-talking.”
Before May even announced her resignation as prime minister, Stewart said he’d like her job. After she quit — and before he’d been in his first cabinet post for a month — he took to touring the country, posting shaky videos of his interactions with the public on social media under the hashtag #RoryWalks. In one of them, he even spoke Dari with an Afghan immigrant.