MPs have tried to kill themselves due to 'unsustainable' pressures, says ex Tory minister

"These are people I knew. And in very serious ways, I mean they almost killed themselves. It’s a miracle they aren't dead. There were other colleagues who had total breakdowns in the most humiliating, personal, embarrassing fashion possible in public.”

Explaining what he thinks is behind the problem he said: “I think it is because the gap between the way that MPs are encouraged to present themselves to the public and who they really are is almost unsustainable.

“It's mad, because you're pretending to be all-knowing, perfect, dynamic, confident. You are pretending that you’ve got the answers to everything, and that 'I know where we're going'.

"The truth is, this is a country of 70 million people, and politicians don't really know what's going on. And yet, we pretend to the public that we do.”

Stewart - who left the Commons in 2019 - opened up to Gloria De Piero ahead of the release of his new memoir, Politics On The Edge.

He admitted that even though he wished was now Prime Minister, he couldn’t be certain he even had a future in politics at all. He also admitted he wasn’t sure who he’d vote for in the next election and might opt for the Lib Dems.

Opening up on life inside the House of Commons, which has seen him forge a career in broadcasting, he also talked about the bullying way some MPs behave and that he hated the person he became while he was an MP.

Asked if he wished he was now PM he said: “Yes, I do. I think it would have been a pretty tumultuous ride. It's not been easy - Brexit, COVID - but I felt that we had a real opportunity in 2019 to try to bring the country together a bit more. I felt it was terribly kind of divided and fractured."

On whether he saw a future for himself in politics, the former Tory Leadership candidate, said: “I think it's difficult. I'm not somebody who's in a very easy position with parties. I sadly broke with the Conservative Party because I belong to a tradition of a much more centrist, more traditional conservatism.

"And so I don't feel comfortable in the direction that the party's going at the moment, but at the same time obviously I'm not a Labour supporter because I have very traditional views about the world. So I think that unless we change our electoral system - and it's one of the things I want to encourage - I think these parties are basically old, dead, and broken.

"And the only way to actually bring some new, fresh ideas in is to do what New Zealand did, which is to change their electoral system, with a bit more proportional representation and smaller parties coming in.

Asked if he’d decided on how he was going to vote in the next General Election he said: "I haven't, no. Usually when I get really stuck, I'm afraid I give up and vote for the Lib Dems.”

Reflecting on how he ended up feeling when he was an MP, he explained: “I ended up despising myself, I would find myself sort of creepily trying to sit next to David Cameron at lunch, and I'd send these texts saying, you know, ‘congratulations on your latest policy’ that I didn't really believe in.

"And so, I began to feel that I was being made, in my early 40s, into some kind of child.

“I’d been the acting governor of an Iraqi province responsible for 3 million people, and a Harvard professor, and I'd run a charity in Afghanistan. I thought that I was a reasonably substantial person. And I realised that as soon as I became an MP, all that was wiped out. Nobody takes you seriously anymore. “

Mr Stewart said an incident involving Archie Norman - the only person to have been chairman of an FTSE 100 company and a Member of the House of Commons at the same time -summed up a lot of what would happen to MPs.

He explained: “You would have thought that if you'd been the chief executive and run a huge supermarket chain, people would take you seriously. I remember all my colleagues saying, oh, we knocked him down to size. You know, we made him wait in the corner of the tea room or we didn't promote him, we showed him.”

Reflecting on the behaviour of some of his former colleagues he continued: “There are some wonderful people at Parliament, people I really loved, and I've praised a lot of them in the book. But, there is also a group of people who are very, very bitter - unfortunately, mostly men - who feel passed over and feel that their basic mission in life is to try to humiliate other people."

Explaining how he felt a big opportunity was missed to clean up politics after the 2010 expenses scandal he said: “I came in at the end of the expenses scandal, and I thought that was a huge opportunity that we missed.

“I think all of the 2010 intake should have come together and said that actually what was going on was disgusting, and we're going to sign up to a code of conduct and we're not going to behave like this other lot.

“Instead, everybody was so delighted to be elected that they immediately wanted to be just like the people before. So I'd like to see the new MPs do that."

Meanwhile Mr Stewart also opened up to GB News about an admission he made several years ago about once smoking opium at a wedding in Iran.

He said: “Well, it didn't have much impact on me. So, in this particular village, it's a polite thing. You're invited to the wedding and they pass it all the way around, so this thing got to me and I thought that I better be polite.

"I then set off up the hill and I thought that I was going to have this sort of strange, out of body experience, but in fact I had a very, very boring day. I was walking for 21 months across Asia and it was one of the most boring days of my 21 month walk.”