FOR the past week Rory Stewart has been foot soldiering his way around parts of England - Woking, Wigan, Warrington, wherever - meeting the Great British Public.

It's a nifty trick, that, engaging with people without any script, mano a mano. It must be fairly nerve wracking, putting your location out there on social media and sitting back to wait and see if anyone shows up.

But Mr Stewart is not a man without stomach. As has been oft repeated this week, he walked across Afghanistan surviving on naught but his wits. Despite making the typical Establishment progression from Eton to PPE at Oxford to the Army and the Foreign Office, he claims to be a man of the people with a foot in all parts of Britain: English but with Welsh and Scottish parents; upper middle class rather than upper class.

What a dichotomy. It makes him interesting. But there is a risk he is making himself too interesting.

Mr Stewart is a serious man but will he be taken seriously by a public that adores big characters while also adoring to scorn them?

British politics has been blighted by big characters. Think Boris Johnson. Think Jacob Rees-Mogg. There is an almost perverse fascination with upper middle class toffs and their odd beliefs and behaviours.

No matter how odious Mr Rees-Mogg's preferred policies and politics, he still garners attention as an interesting character. His children's names are mocked as ridiculous, his relationship with nanny is fodder for fun. In fact, he has a place in the public eye because of these fripperies.

Mr Johnson is the same. We know he is ridiculous and dangerous in his desire to lead the country to a no deal Brexit. Yet look, look at his funny hair. Look at him there, on a zip wire. How hilarious he is on his bicycle.

There's an air of Jeeves and Wooster about Mr Stewart with his slender frame and precise enunciation. There have been several comparisons made with John Buchan's characters.

Who can fail to view with fondness a man who says this in Parliament, in a beautiful speech on hedgehogs: "I refer of course to my own constituent, the famous cleanliness representative of Penrith and The Border, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle." But one should be careful not to mistake whimsy for vacuity.

In an interview in 2010, the MP for Penrith and The Borders said: "My greatest ambition would be to be somebody who made some kind of intelligent, lasting contribution to political thought, much more than working my way up through the system at the cost of being a mediocre prime minister."

We see that commitment to serious thought and interesting questioning in interview answers this week, particularly in his lucid explanation of international trading on WTO terms.

In contrast, there was Dominic Raab, still failing to understand the basics of feminism. "The point I was making is that sexism is wrong and it's wrong if it's said about a woman or about a man," he said in an interview this week, with an almost bullish lack of intellectual rigour, "And I think equality is too precious a value for us to put up with double standards."

The best you can say for that, is that he's kept consistently to a position, having previously declared himself anti-feminist. And haven't we seen how important the lack of turning has been to Mr Raab's forebears.

Mr Stewart has been held to account for smoking opium at a wedding in Iran. Most politicians wear their poppies on their lapels. Mr Stewart's patriotism goes that bit further.

Fellow leadership hopeful Jeremy Hunt admitted he once drank a cannabis lassi, so Mr Stewart is not the only one with a blot on his copybook.

Mr Stewart is being criticised also for, as a Tory, voting for Tory policies. The issue, for those opposed to him, is not his voting record, surely, it is his allegiance. But, whatever your party politics, the country is to acquire a new Prime Minister and, without the unlikely event of a general election, he is someone who those of the opposite persuasion can warm to.

He is a man with an interesting hinterland. In a better Britain might we have Stewart as leader of the Conservatives and Jess Phillips MP as Labour leader? We can dream.

Brexit has left Britain bruised and battered and longing for something different. An Old Etonian may not be far away enough from those who have brutally damaged the country but he is a sight more singular than his leadership competitors. His speech to would-be voters appealed for the showing of love. Love.

It's not often you hear a politician speak of such a thing. Mr Stewart is a polymath, the likes of which our European Union counterparts have grown unaccustomed to facing at the negotiation table.

We have a problem in public life whereby we reward larger than life characters - Boris, Jacob - at the cost of serious politics. Mr Stewart has all the attributes of a character but we shouldn't be fooled - there's far more to him, as long as he can make that clear to those with a say in the leadership race.

There's a fine line between character politics and personality politics and Mr Stewart must be careful on which side he treads.