Rory Stewart Pre-recorded via Videolink (18:00 BST)

Rory Stewart's pre-recorded interview. BBC’s Allan Little will introduce this recorded interview on the festival stage.

In his best-selling book, Politics On The Edge, Rory Stewart relates how over the course of a decade as an MP, he went from being a political outsider to becoming an effective government minister to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Stewart learned at first-hand how hollow our democracy and government had become as individual politicians laid the foundations for today’s political and economic chaos.

Grounded in his earlier careers as a Scottish soldier, diplomat, travel writer, philanthropist and international academic, he talks with wisdom and approachability – familiar to his thousands of followers on-line including from his co-hosted podcast The Rest is Politics – on our era of populism and global conflict offering sanity and empathy in a disputatious age.

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