Rory Stewart - the Tory MP who went to Afghanistan and came back with a glamorous new fiancé

For the American academic Noah Coburn, volunteering in Afghanistan was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime. Instead it broke his marriage as his wife left him for the telegenic Tory MP
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When Noah Coburn arrived in Afghanistan with his wife to volunteer at a charity set up by Prince Charles, he could be forgiven for thinking life would be very different.

The respected political anthropologist left his library at Boston University, Massachusetts far behind to live and work in the war-torn country whose tribal politics he always found fascinating.

Accompanying him on the “trip of a lifetime” in 2006 was his beautiful wife Shoshana. She also found a post at the Turquoise Mountain charity, which aimed to inject new life into Afghanistan’s battered arts scene.

But Coburn could never have imagined quite how different life would become. Within two years, he had returned to academia in a far-flung corner of the United States. And Shoshana is now engaged to Turquoise Mountain’s co-founder, high-flying Conservative MP Rory Stewart, whose life is being made into a film by Brad Pitt.

Speaking to the Evening Standard from his new home — the tiny rural town of Bennington in the state of Vermont — Coburn admitted it was an “awkward situation”.

“I’m still very fond of Shoshana,” he said. “I’m still friends with her and I’m friends with Rory but it’s not as if we keep in regular touch.”

Understandably sensitive about the breakdown of his marriage, he added: “The Kabul community is a small world where everyone tends to know each other.”

The young couple spent most of their time working with a group of potters in the village of Istalif, 18 miles north-west of the capital Kabul. But the spectre of death loomed ever-present in Kabul, which put a strain on the marriage. Noah once narrowly escaped serious injury when a building on the opposite side of the street was blown up. “Those dangers are a daily part of life in Afghanistan,” he shrugged.

The bespectacled academic was keen to stress he wishes Stewart and Shoshana well and is reluctant to talk about the break-up. However, a friend was more open about the stresses placed on a couple living in a war zone. He said: “The Afghan community is a small bubble with bombs going off all the time, so it’s not great for marriages. It puts a lot of pressure on relationships and you work out quickly whether yours is going to work.

“Marriages come to an end. Unfortunately Noah and Shoshana realised that their marriage wasn’t working. But he has no ill feelings towards Rory. He’s not sitting around and letting it eat away at him.”

Life in Afghanistan was a world away from his life today in Bennington — population 15,000 — where he lectures at a small liberal arts college with just 800 students.

Central to Coburn’s Afghanistan experience was the charity Turquoise Mountain, which was set up by Stewart in 2005 following a personal request from his friend Prince Charles and Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The Old Etonian — who remained close to the Prince of Wales after a stint as a childhood tutor to Princes William and Harry — had links to Afghanistan following his famous 32-day walk across the country at the height of George W Bush’s “War on Terror” in 2002.

The 39-year-old Stewart wrote a book of his experiences, The Places in Between, which became a New York Times bestseller, with the venerable American newspaper hailing it a “flat-out masterpiece”.

Stewart continued his career rise with Turquoise Mountain, whose directors read like a Who’s Who of the British Establishment. They include Edward Cadogan, Viscount Chelsea, who lives near Stewart in Scotland and is heir to a £2 billion property estate spanning 90 acres in Knightsbridge, Sir John Tusa, former boss of the BBC World Service, and Khaled Said, the son of Syrian-born billionaire Wafic Said, who recently bought the Notting Hill home of Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross for £35 million.

In its first five years of existence, Turquoise Mountain raised more than £12 million to fund two major projects; the restoration of traditional mud-and-timber buildings in Murad Khane, a rubbish-filled area of Kabul; and to establish a school of Afghan arts and architecture. The charity also attracted well-heeled volunteers such as Noah, Shoshana and Thierry Kelaart, a close friend of Pippa Middleton’s from their time at Edinburgh University.

It seemed money was no object for Turquoise Mountain, with the latest accounts revealing it held “two major fundraising dinners” with Prince Charles in London and other board members in New York. Indeed, its gilded connections have led some to question just how close Turquoise Mountain is to Western governments.

Former British diplomat Craig Murray has alleged Stewart was an MI6 officer and still active when he set up the charity in Afghanistan — his father Brian Stewart worked for decades in the Foreign Office, and once admitted he was in line to become the director of MI6 in the Seventies. Tantalisingly, Stewart is vague in his denials that he was a spy, though he fiercely denies being in the security services at the time he arrived in Afghanistan.

And yet Turquoise Mountain’s latest accounts, lodged at Companies House, disclose the charity grew in 2010 “thanks largely to support from the US Government” and its commissions included a “large” artwork produced for the American embassy in Kabul.

However, the momentum behind Turquoise Mountain seemed to dissipate after Stewart left in 2009 to become Tory MP for Penrith and the Border in Cumbria — via a short stint in academia at Harvard — and last month it was dropped from the Prince of Wales’s prestigious Charities Foundation.

Stewart seemed untroubled by his decision to leave Kabul and begin a new career in politics. He told The New Yorker in typically modest fashion: “Why would I run an arts school in Kabul? I don’t think Alexander the Great ran an arts school.” When he realised he had just compared himself to one of the totemic figures of world history, he added: “If you try to put it down in black and white, the irony vanishes and the monstrous egotism is revealed.”

Stewart recently got engaged to Shoshana, who relocated to London last September to move in with him. The MP’s charmed existence continues. The rights to his life story were bought up by Brad Pitt several years ago and the MP is reportedly to be played by Orlando Bloom. Meanwhile, Shoshana is studying for an MBA at the London School of Business & Finance and is said to be running Turquoise Mountain on a part-time basis from London.

Her former husband says their marriage broke down before the MP got together with the astrophysics graduate, but he does take issue with his record in Afghanistan.

He said: “Much of the resentment [towards Stewart] has come from how his walk was blown out of proportion. It attracted a lot of publicity and it quickly saw him regarded as an authority on the country, which disgruntled the experts who had been there for years. I’m also not as big a supporter of Rory as some other people are — I tend to think his ideas on Afghanistan are fine, though not entirely revolutionary.”

A friend of Coburn’s added: “The way (Stewart) dresses and talks winds people up. He has an air about him which some people don’t warm to. But to others he’s a hero.

“Turquoise Mountain is very impressive. It has done a really great job, but the restoring of the old city seemed to have Rory’s face on it. He became seen as some Lawrence of Arabia figure and that didn’t make everyone happy. People would moan about it in the bars. The other NGOs struggled to get funding because of the attention Turquoise Mountain got.”

But will this romantic venture — which attracted such illustrious support — survive now it is the hands of the Afghans? Or will it come to be seen as a forgotten chapter in the Rory Stewart story; a footnote to his marriage and parliamentary career?

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