Rory Stewart has told Novara Media

This is a practiced politician playing to an audience, a man who knows his post-politics media career is also served by telling people what he thinks they want to hear.

Don't project insight or decency onto him.

This is incredibly weird given that, while he sold himself as a liberal Tory, Rory Stewart is a former British army officer and probable MI6 agent. Presume there's some weird angle at play here but equally I suppose the establishment could be realising that the Starmer/Streeting brand of centrist extremism is viscerally unpleasant to anyone with a soul and might want them to reel it back a bit, who knows.