Rory Stewart

speaker

267 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 3d ago

Rory Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 206. How Putin's War Changed Finland Forever (Sanna Marin) · 13 Sep 2026 podcast

And of course to remind people, um, you know, we're particularly fond of the the president of Finland and have done a lot of reporting on Alex Stubb's theory of the world. voice-verified

She comes from a different political tradition. voice-verified

Um we were both actually in uh Finland together. voice-verified

I was really struck by the story that we don't talk about enough, which is how these countries have gone from being quite small c conservative to being startlingly progressive relatively recently. voice-verified

I mean, th there's a big statue that we walked past on our way to the hotel of this man called General Manaheim, who was the leader, get this of the whites after the First World War, and who, you know, was photographed. voice-verified

Photographed with Hitler and was the great sort of heroic Finnish nationalist leader, but he was a proper kind of aristocratic general who continued to run the country at an almost Trumpian age. voice-verified

And yet we've gone from that to voice-verified

As she says, uh when she was growing up it was still quite conservative. voice-verified

Difficult for her to have a mother who was uh living with another woman. voice-verified

And now we see these countries as the most progressive countries on earth. voice-verified

They do like their statues. voice-verified

And also get forgotten surprisingly quickly. voice-verified

I mean, you go from being she she was a genuine celebrity. voice-verified

I mean, if we were doing this podcast four years ago, we would have used Sana Marin and Jacinta Arden as sort of ciphers for exactly the kind of progressive politics that people were interested in and as leaders to look like, the sort of precursors of the way we talk about Mark Carney at the moment. voice-verified

And I don't know how voice-verified

you'd poll it, but I imagine three years later a lot of people have half forgotten about them and and the world that they used to live in. voice-verified

which is twenty, thirty years ago they would have gone on to be the heads of big UN agencies. voice-verified

It's so it's almost exactly the career path that you'd expect a female Prime Minister in New Zealand or Finland to go on to, seem to have faded away too. voice-verified

Those sort of international organisations have faded away, leaving a question on what they do next. voice-verified

And I think that's what we ended on, and I think it's probably the most interesting political point, which is how successfully the kind of reaction or reactionary movements have been in making what used to be considered very straightforward arguments about human rights become somehow look like old fashioned, progressive, woke you know, how unfashionable in a way. voice-verified

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