Rory Stewart on silence, eccentricity, night-climbing, and hope

One of the oddest metrics of British political life is the concept of pintability: the question of whether you’d go for a beer at the pub with your prospective Prime Minister or MP. It was a yard-stick sometimes held up against Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in last year's general election – the sense that neither of them was necessarily Stella fodder; the feeling that each of them would be tough work in the smoking area. It is a gnawing concern. I have stood in a pub in Westminster and watched Matt Hancock, a pint of lager in his hand like an Oscar statuette, go on desperately about how he and most politicians were just “normal people”, which is not something, you’ll notice, that normal people often do. (A few days later he was in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity..., a show whose title alone slightly negated his central thesis.) Matt Hancock, per- haps, has another type of pintability, in that you wouldn’t mind pouring one over his head. Annoyingly, I think he’d actually like it.