rory stewart mp

I have spent the last two days walking along the Eden. I thought I would experience and remember it as a single flowing stream. But instead it seems many rivers. At Mallerstang below the falls the valley is narrow, with folds and rivulets and short limestone distances that conceal castles. The dark rearing crest of Wild Boar Fell seems part of an entirely different landscape, looking over all 1,200 square miles of the constituency from Blencathra to Bewcastle. After Kirkby Stephen the river is tranquil and measured in its meanderings, at odds with the framing line of the Pennines and the volcanic pikes behind. A sudden wall of pink sandstone at Temple Sowerby seems the setting of an oriental mystery but two miles later, approaching Langwathby, the flood plain is bare and treeless and the gravel scattered with desultory cows. Tonight, before Lazonby, I am sleeping near dark rock-falls and caves.

Eden has given its name to a district. Many of our community groups take their names from the river and its tributaries. It is the water that some of us drink, a landscape we love, a lure for tourists: an artery. But walking along it, I sometimes feel we have abandoned it. From the banks one glimpses the backs of houses, sewage treatment plants, dead-end tracks, slurry tanks. In Hartley, or Morland, the houses look towards the stream and the mill-race. But those are unusual tributaries. The main river often flows behind and apart from the villages. Even accessing the banks feels furtive: that one is discovering something almost like a disused canal.  In places it is only half-accessible, ringed with old barbed wire, touched in places by Japanese knot weed or down half-crumbled sandy cliffs.

Today I was joined in the walk by a grassland expert, an organic dairy farmer, a professor of soil science, a water habitat expert and a man who had fished the river for fifty years. They showed me how sometimes, every mile, the nature of the river changed completely because of a new stone-base or even the barrier formed by a bridge. They let me handle white-clawed crayfish and told me the fish lived only in limestone because they need the calcium for their shell. They explained how the Borrowdale volcanic rock in the Derwent meant water poor in nutrients and filled with oxygen, delighting certain flies who avoided the nutrient-rich Eden. They showed the riffles, which pleased the new-hatched fry, and the pools for the parr and the runs for the adult salmon. They explained the impact of fertiliser, stock, and soil management.  They showed how phosphates had encouraged the algae, which choked the gills of the crayfish and left the three types of lamprey unable to breath above the silt.

But when I heard more about what this meant for farmers - the sixty five thousand pound tanks that need to be built for slurry to keep nitrogen out of the river, the banning of bare fields on the water edge, the emphasis on core sampling and soil analysis, the specific times of year in which fertiliser should be laid, the strict controls on stocking - it looked much less easy. How, when margins are so tight, can farmers be expected to invest so much money and time and research in something whose effect on their farm is often, at least in the short-term, indirect?

What impresses me most about the Eden Rivers Trust is the effort it makes to engage with farmers: Robert Warburton, the Chair, is a farmer; Will and Tom from ERT who accompanied me on the walk are farmers. Hundreds of volunteers are working with the Trust. I came across them on Wednesday counting trout and on Thursday counting crayfish. They remove abandoned objects from the river near Carlisle, and they weed Himalayan balsam from the banks. Most importantly they get things done. At Hoff, for example, I saw a ford which had blocked the movement of fish. The agencies had complained about it for decades. But the ford was the only way of getting the milk wagons in to the dairy farm and new work carried many risks for the river. So the agencies had done nothing. It was ERT who ultimately convinced the farmer, reassured all the agencies, found the contractor, filled out all the paperwork and had the culvert installed in ten days - often working at night without disrupting the milk truck. The fish are now spawning freely in the Hoff again.

My previous walks have taken me over, away from, or high above the river. I have experienced the landscape largely in terms of slopes and trees, boulders and peat. Suddenly I am able to hear its movement. I begin to mark the different geologies, and understand something about the algae and fly, fish and fertiliser. I am learning how (often for very understandable reasons) we have polluted or tried to tame the flow. But what I will remember most is the farmers and volunteers who are daily protecting and preserving this, our river: our Eden.

A decade of the PlusBus is coming to an end, which is very sad news indeed; it is essential that we recognise the work of the PlusBus committee, who have put so much effort into this service over the past ten years. They have done a fabulous job of keeping this running and have successfully secured three rounds of Lottery funding in order to do so. It is incredibly sad that the committee feel unable to secure a fourth round of funding, particularly at a time when this, of all projects, really is the 'Big Society' in action. I am hopeful that the ‘Big Society’ agenda will, in the future, help initiatives such as the PlusBus in terms of breaking down bureaucratic barriers and helping to overcome the demands of the vast amounts of paperwork that have essentially contributed to the PlusBus’ closure.

Above all, this service demonstrates the very urgent need for better rural transport systems, such as the Fellrunner buses of the Northern Fells Group. Community groups in Upper Eden have, I know, been working very hard to try to secure alternatives. Efforts have been put into maintaining a one-day-per-week shopping service, and there has been much input from the committee and the County Council to maintain a service that works for residents. The Rural Wheels and Volunteer Drivers scheme will go some way to filling the void, and - within the Upper Eden Transport Forum - volunteers have already come forward to become volunteer drivers in our villages. GPs have been contacted to ensure that patients make their appointments, and the surgery in Kirkby Stephen has agreed to be flexible in admitting patients whose appointment may not necessarily coincide with the Rural Wheels timetable. These are common-sense solutions made by the community, for the community. The real loss will be the service that the PlusBus provides to and from the train station, but I am encouraged to hear that there are already discussions about the development of a shuttle bus service to and from the station; it is likely that this would be a seasonal service with Rural Wheels and volunteer drivers on hand to service the local community needs in getting to the station. This is without a doubt an issue of major importance, and I aim to put better rural transport high on our list of priorities for the entire constituency, and Upper Eden as a vanguard pilot area for the ‘Big Society’

A week ago, Cumbria; next week, Cumbria again, walking along the Eden River from Mallerstang. But today I am in a provincial Vietnamese town with my 88-year old father. We have just been for a walk at 5.30 in the morning. The mist drifts slowly around the foot-hills and above the narrow fishing boats. Teenagers are kicking shuttlecocks back and forth in the air beside the ancient walls of Hue palace. As my father observes with a grin, ‘We must look like a pretty nutty pair.’ He is wearing a blue blazer (it is already 80 degrees) and his highly polished black brogues contrast with the mud on my boots. We cross roads slowly, arm in arm, as some magical protection against the never-ceasing flow of a thousand mopeds with drivers in what seem to be toy plastic helmets. In his left hand he carries a ski-stick. In my right I carry a bag containing his Boots instant camera and eight books on Vietnamese history, each page of which he has energetically underlined. 

My father has a distinctive approach to towns, which involves walking, music, energetic conversations about the army, toys and white rice. Even in Penrith, he can be seen marching around in tartan trews, accosting brass bands, talking to Malcolm Temple in the George Hotel, examining the toyshop or dining at the Magic Bean. But in Vietnam, he enters a new dimension. He begins with a cup of tea at a street stall at dawn, using a dictionary to learn the local language. ‘Vietnamese,’ he assures me now, ‘is easy if you speak Cantonese and Mandarin.’ (I don’t: he does.) Then he investigates new forms of transport. He failed to persuade me onto an elephant yesterday and I dissuaded him from riding a motorbike. But, despite being told by me and everyone else that there were no boats, he re-emerged grinning on the prow of a motorboat.

Since he is 88, I try to make him rest. But in Saigon, while I was writing an e-mail to the Cumberland hospital, he slipped out and re-emerged two hours later, with a very red face, having just marched two miles back from the market in the midday heat, announcing ‘I don’t think much of this pace-maker’. He agreed to sit in the cool and have a beer for only half an hour before accompanying me forty miles outside the city to a battleground. There he clambered into the Vietcong tunnel system and, on the basis of his experience as an anti-tank gunner in 1944, he held forth on the weak points of a ruined tank.  In the evening, he discovered a toy-stall, selling a battery-operated toy mandarin and listened to a man playing a bamboo flute. We shared a bowl of white rice by a lake.

He was here last, 43 years ago, as a British diplomat during the Vietnam War. He argued strongly in 1967, on the basis of the pride he saw in the Vietnamese living around him in Hanoi, that the US would not win. He notices parallels which others can’t, in part because of his age. When he came to visit me in Afghanistan four years ago, generals were saying that we would win ‘as we had in the Malayan Emergency.’ But my father had been in Malaya, as an official, for twelve years throughout the emergency. ‘We’re not going to be able to win,’ he said, ‘because we don’t have any control over the Afghan government.’

But what I learn most is not about international affairs. It is about an approach to life: a sort of energy, which makes him reinvent himself daily even at 88. In the fierce heat and dust of the Imperial city he scrabbles around with his walking-stick to uncover a shard of porcelain. He no sooner arrives at a hotel but he is out again, on the streets, with a map, searching for a lost building. He tears through books, marking stories, noting new thoughts. Every evening he has a new story or connection to make between what we have seen and done.

Last night, we went for a swim. I don’t remember learning to walk but I remember him teaching me how to swim. I remember as a four year old admiring the freckles on his shoulders and the scar from a shrapnel wound in his thigh. They’re still there, as are his deep breaths and slow underwater breast-stroke and the way he emerges like a walrus from the water. ‘It is wonderful,’ he said, ‘to be in water. I feel old on land. I have to walk slowly, think about my balance. But here I am weightless. I can swim as fast as I always could, travel underwater as far.' He stayed in the water 'til it was dark and I was cold. I watched from the side while he attempted, again, to swim the whole length without breathing. ‘No good,’ he concluded on the sixth attempt, ‘no good, but perhaps not bad for 88.’

I am setting up a Young Farmers’ advisory committee. We will meet regularly to talk about the future of farming in Cumbria. Our focus will be on Cumbria’s unique needs. I am a real admirer of the NFU and would like to see it fight even harder in government but it is forced to represent farmers right across the country. And clearly a fenland Barley Baron has very different interests, views on subsidies and policy than a hill-farmer in Bewcastle. Even within Penrith and the Border there are vast differences between dairy on the Solway plain and commons above Dufton. I am hoping that the Young Farmers’ group will help me to understand more and more about those different needs, so that I can fight our corner in government. Farmers know more, care more and understand more about land management than any quango or civil servant. Government has to learn how to learn from farmers and benefit from their depth of experience, their passion and their commonsense. They have to learn to listen.

We can all see things which need to be done immediately: making sure the milk ombudsman has real power; and challenging daft new regulations like the EID tagging for sheep. And we can see things, which government can do to improve rural services from roads to broadband.   But the most important fight, I believe, is going to be the CAP renewal in Brussels in the next two years. We must make sure that Cumbrian voices are properly represented in that process. So I will be working to persuade every DEFRA minister to visit Cumbria, will be going to Brussels myself and will be talking continually to groups like the Young Farmers’ advisory group to make sure I am carrying the right message.

Being an MP is a great honour. And on a bike ride, very enjoyable. But I will, of course, only be any good at the job if I listen and learn from the right people. I am immensely grateful for all the time that Cumbrian farmers have put into teaching me. I intend to work very hard to make sure their advice becomes policy.