This is a global original podcast.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Full Disclosure with me, James O'Brien,

joined this week by a man who, I suspect even two months ago would probably have needed

rather more introduction than he does now. I speak, of course, of the politician Rory Stewart and erstwhile leadership contender,

which is why, of course, your name is probably better known now than it was a couple of months ago. Although,

I had to double-check your birth date, Rory, because you have crammed so much into your life that it makes me feel a bit inadequate. The diplomatic service

alluded to in the Telegraph during the campaign that you may have been operating on Her Majesty's

Secret Service. You've been a lecturer at Harvard. You ran a small NGO in Kabul. You spent two

years walking across Asia for a book to which Brad Pitt, no less,

then secured the film rights, and you're still only 46. When did you start achieving at such

a lofty level? So what really, I'm achieving a lofty level, but what turned my life around was that walk.

So I'd been diplomat working in embassies.

And when I was 28, I took two years off.

And I walked from Turkey to Bangladesh, so across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and stayed in about 550 village houses

long away and every night sitting, just listening to people in their houses, talk about

themselves, the government. And that really is what changed me, because at the end of that

period, alone and listening to those people, I had a very

different idea of myself, but also of what governments do in these countries than I did before.

Why did you undertake the trip in the first place? What prompted it? I think when I set off,

I thought it would be a kind of grand adventure. So a sort of Patrick Lee Furmore style

Odyssey. Yeah. And I also thought there would be that I'd be able to remember every step along the journey

and that I'd have a sort of magical memory where I'd be able to think about 6,000 miles of footprints

...