'This is serious': the unlikely rise of Rory Stewart's pitch to be PM

Three weeks ago, Rory Stewart was holding a wobbly camera at Kew Gardens, trying to combine a fledgling leadership campaign with a trip to talk to conservationists there about his day job at the Department for International Development.

Apart from his documentaries on Afghanistan or his energetic defence of Theresa May’s Brexit deal on any radio station that would have him, few people outside of Westminster knew much about the Eton-educated Black Watch veteran.

Yet in the past 12 hours his campaign team say they have received earnest enquiries from backers of both Boris Johnson and Michael Gove about potential jobs – not for Stewart, but jobs that might be available in a future Stewart administration.

The MP for Penrith and the Border came a shock fourth in the Tory leadership contest on Tuesday, making it to the next round with 37 votes, an increase of 18 since last week.

Victoria Prentis, one of his earliest backers, who has been doing numbers for the Stewart campaign, said she was overjoyed. “MPs told us they were really starting to get traction from their constituents, they were starting to get what we are trying to do,” she said. “He has a different way of communicating, but it is really getting through to people’s constituents. He really can do this.”

Stewart’s campaign has ruffled the positioning of his rivals. “It is fair to say that Rory Stewart ruined almost everyone’s initial plans,” a member of a rival Tory leadership camp said.

One of Stewart’s team said most MPs initially believed his campaign was “either a joke or just a ‘suicide bomber’, as it was impolitely put for another candidate like [Michael] Gove … but it’s been in the last week where people have realised this is really serious.”

For a man whose background includes Eton, the Foreign Office and, possibly, the intelligence services, Stewart has done well to paint himself as the outsider rather than Javid, the Rotherham-born son of a Pakistani bus driver.

He has overshadowed both Matt Hancock and Dominic Raab’s claim to be the fresh face of the party’s future, taking apart the latter’s unwillingness to rule out proroguing parliament.

His viral Twitter and video campaigning have made his other rivals look cautious and old-fashioned. One MP said they believed Stewart had identified one place that Tory MPs would definitely be watching.

Related: If you think Rory Stewart is the grownup choice, think again | Ash Sarkar

“Twitter is the worst place to campaign to win over the general public, but this is different, Tory MPs are obsessively monitoring it,” the MP said. “And really, what other choice did he have?

“Every MP will say yes to a personal chitchat with Boris; if Rory had tried that same tactic, he would have flunked. Most colleagues might not even have bothered to watch a standard campaign launch speech if he’d done one.”

While Gove and Jeremy Hunt have issued attacks on rivals’ “seriousness” or suggested one candidate could be divisive – both code for Johnson – Stewart has been prepared to outflank them, at one point openly questioning whether Johnson could be trusted with the nuclear codes.

Stewart says he has been told by other campaigns that his willingness to float his policy ideas to members of the public on his walks around the country has scuppered some of their plans for major announcements.

One campaign was reportedly planning to launch the idea of a national citizens service after months of debating its merits. Stewart breezily announced his version on handheld camera after a walkabout in Derby.

His campaign benefited at the start from low expectations, and for days leading up to the first vote his tally of supporters was in single figures. When he met the threshold he looked like the insurgent because so many had assumed he would be knocked out.

Stewart’s unexpected success was the nail in the coffin for Hancock, who had hoped to hoover up Stewart’s supporters in the next round but instead found his base being cannibalised.

One big gain for Stewart’s campaign has been the support of the justice secretary, David Gauke, a heavyweight who has been prepared to go out to bat for him on the airwaves and on Twitter, where he has made spicy comments about the fitness of Johnson to steward the economy. The campaign has also won the support of David Lidington, the deputy prime minister.

“Lidington was obviously a huge gain for us, we are the only ones picking up those high-profile backers in recent days apart from Boris,” one source on the Stewart campaign said.

Other MPs will point out that his supporters are not anything like a solid bloc vote, more a ragtag of those on the party’s centre-left, remain supporters, the last of the Theresa May loyalists and some personal friends.

One MP, a member of the One Nation group of Tory centrists, which was founded by Amber Rudd, said they could never back Stewart because he was so divisive.

“He effectively told one half of the party that they are stupid,” the MP said. “That is not how you unite the party. He seems to care far more about winning likes on Twitter than persuading colleagues that he can heal the party’s wounds and beat [Labour’s Jeremy] Corbyn.”

Stewart’s backers believe he will have transformed the contest, win or lose. “He shows the potential for the Conservative party to broaden its base and he has injected some realism into the debate around Brexit. That has changed the terms,” one campaign source said.