One of the best books I’ve read on failure in politics is Michael Ignatieff’s Fire and Ashes. It is a searingly honest account of how the author became the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party and, confronted by the low cunning of Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, led it to its worst ever defeat at the 2011 general election. Ignatieff was a journalist, broadcaster, biographer (of Isaiah Berlin) and academic before he became a politician after approaches were made to him by Liberal grandees (his father was a former senior diplomat). He had spent most of his career outside Canada – in London, where he was a presenter of ideas and arts programmes on the BBC, and Boston, where he taught at Harvard. He was cerebral and cosmopolitan. He had a sense of his own destiny as what Aristotle called a “great-souled man”. But he failed at politics. He was temperamentally ill-suited to the daily grind and relentlessness of the campaign trail. His skin was too thin to endure the “venomous personal abuse” he received and ceaseless public meetings wearied him. What did Tony Blair and Bill Clinton know that he did not, Ignatieff asked, adding that “there are no techniques in politics”. The successful Conservative attack line against him was that he was “Just Visiting”. In other words, he was a dilettante rather than a seriously committed career politician. He was merely passing through.
Could the same be said of Mark Carney, another cool, cerebral technocrat to whom the Liberals turned in desperation? Carney, an alumnus of Goldman Sachs and a former governor of the Bank of England, is the personification of Davos Man. And yet, so far, he seems to have something that Ignatieff did not: good luck. Luck and timing are as important as technique in politics. Before Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and boasted about absorbing the vast sovereign nation into the United States, the Liberals were trailing Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by more than 20 per cent in the polls. Poilievre seemed to be riding the wave of the new anti-establishment conservatism all the way to Sussex Drive. He is a brash, anti-woke populist who wants to dismantle the bureaucratic state. His positioning is straight from the Maga playbook. But Carney, edging ahead in the polls as the campaign begins, has another significant advantage over Ignatieff: he is an expert in global finance as Canada becomes embroiled in a trade war with its bullying former ally. Canada is turning against Trumpism.
Content from our partners
