Rory Stewart, new British MP for Penrith and the Border, is not the only accomplished writer to enter the House of Commons in the May 2010 elections.   Joining him is fellow Conservative, Zac Goldsmith, an environmentalist journalist and now MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston, and, for Labour, historian Tristam Hunt, now MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central.  As surely befits an MP representing The Potteries, Hunt is an historian of Britain’s great industrialisation of the nineteenth century and wrote a superb life of Friedrich Engels.
Given their diverse backgrounds, it would be fascinating to hear Stewart and Hunt debate the legacies of empire on modern Britain, and how their respective constituencies – at opposite extremes of the rural-city divide – can both prosper.  Personally, I believe that commercial development of the environmental and energy sector is the only way that manufacturing in the old-world will survive this century, and this is also a sector with the potential to better connect city and country (eg, through the deployment of small-scale power-generating plants).    A web-dialog or a joint TV series, anyone?
References:
Tristam Hunt[2009]: The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. (London, UK;  Allen Lane).  I reviewed this book briefly here.
Previous posts on books and articles by Rory Stewart here, here and here.