Rory Stewart is reportedly the bookies’ second-favourite to become the next prime minister after his appearance in a TV hustings event on Sunday night gained him a surge in support.
The Telegraph has learned from a Whitehall security source that Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart spent seven years working for MI6 prior to embarking upon a career in parliament.
The source told The Telegraph that Stewart, a former private tutor to the young Princes William and Harry, was recruited as an Oxford graduate in the 1990s and was not regarded as a “high flier” at MI6.
At a meet-the-candidates event on Monday, International Development Secretary Rory Stewart denied that he had ever spied for MI6.
Asked last week whether he had been a spy, he said he had not, but that: “It’s the Secret Intelligence Service, bound by the Official Secrets Act. So even if you found someone who was an intelligence officer, they wouldn’t tell you they were an intelligence officer”.
Stewart, 46, has had to fend off questions regarding whether he worked for MI6 for years. His father Brian was second in command at the organisation as its Assistant Chief from 1974 to 1979.
Initially, the claim surfaced in the New Yorker magazine in 2010, when journalist Ian Parker wrote that Stewart “certainly was” a spy when he was working in Indonesia and Montenegro at the start of his diplomatic career.
The magazine suggested it would be “frustrating” for him if he was “under a legal and moral obligation to mislead”.
At the time Stewart called it “an unfair question” but is reported to have told the journalist that he could allude to a past in espionage.
Stewart, 46, added that people should have “the very, very clear understanding that I stopped working in embassies and for the government proper in 2000” and that from then on: “I was no longer part of the system.”
According to the magazine, a blog claimed that in 2005, when Stewart worked in Afghanistan for the Turquoise Mountain Foundation charity that the Prince of Wales helped found, he was still a spy.
Stewart is currently riding a surge of support after his appearance in a TV meet-the-press event on Sunday night and is reportedly being placed second-favourite to become the next prime minister as a genuine contender to reach a head-to-head against Boris Johnson.