Fire and Ashes: success and failure in politics

Some readers will find this a rather sad book, albeit one with a genuinely honourable purpose – a Canadian catharsis. Michael Ignatieff, despite his own bruising experiences of democratic politics in his native Canada, wants to encourage the young to regard politics as an honourable calling or adventure. Electoral politics in a plural society is a “noble struggle”, and he gives a brief and eloquent justification for this judgement. Some – in view of his own tribulations – will find this counter-intuitive, but the argument is given added credibility by the painful experiences out of which it was squeezed.

The narrative can be briefly told. Mr Ignatieff is a distinguished political philosopher and academic, among whose many books is an excellent study of Isaiah Berlin. He is a transatlantic public intellectual, almost a hanging offence in some of our Western democracies. In 2004, “men in black” called on him at Harvard where he was a professor to urge him to return to Canada after many years to join the Liberal Party, which was on the slide, and become one of its standard bearers.

Succumbing perhaps – he says uncharitably about himself – to hubris, he is parachuted into Canadian politics and rapidly becomes leader of his party. But this is no longer the Canada of his parents’ Lester Pearson generation. In five-and-a-half years, not even long enough to qualify for a parliamentary pension, he goes from hero to zero, leading his party to a crashing defeat and even losing his own seat. So it’s back to the library along with other intellectuals like Alexis de Tocqueville and Mario Vargas Llosa, who also came a cropper when they tried their hand at the vulgarities of politics.

I suspect that few outside Canada know much about the tides of politics there. Since most of us have to rack our brains to think of one unpleasant Canadian, it may come as a shock to discover that the political debate there these days seems surprisingly and disagreeably partisan and that the electorate can give such brutal verdicts on their leaders. Parties on both the Left and the Right are wiped out with regular incontinent abandon.

Ignatieff seems to have been a victim on both counts. He was depicted in a series of attack-ads as an interloper, out for himself. “Just Visiting”, one said; “He didn’t come back for you,” said another. The author depicts Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, as “a transactional opportunist with no fixed compass other than the pursuit of power”. Harper certainly seems to have run rings around his opponents. His party employed  shameless tactics of negative campaigning, defining its opponents before they could define him or themselves.

I came to this book with a slight prejudice. Bob Rae, whom Ignatieff twice defeated in struggles for the leadership of the Liberal Party, is a friend of mine, as he was and perhaps still is of Ignatieff. Rae is a smart Rhodes Scholar, schooled in the rough left-wing politics of Ontario. It is difficult to believe that he would have been as easy a target for Harper or as clumsy a strategist during the constitutional crisis of 2009, which could have seen Harper’s Conservatives replaced by a coalition government including the Liberals. And there’s the rub. Ignatieff wasn’t actually very good at politics. But nor, for that matter – as he points out – were Cicero and Burke.

Perhaps Ignatieff is putting a brave face on it, but he claims to have quite enjoyed his years as a politician. He clearly learned things about himself, was reminded (as happens to many of us) what a corker his wife was, and came to understand and love Canada even more. He describes the 35 days of his disastrous 2011 campaign as the happiest period of his political journey. Brave man. Most of us find fighting a losing campaign a truly awful experience. Having gone through this myself, I could no more write about it than I would contemplate doing it all again. I would fear that my account would reek of self-pity, self-regard and self-justification. It is a measure of Ignatieff’s character that such sentiments rarely leak onto his pages.

Overall, this is a brave and mostly convincing case for the young to consider a life in democratic politics. Better advice, certainly, than I once heard a British politician give to an aspirant, who was told that to get into parliament he should just tell people what they wanted to hear. That politician, unlike Ignatieff, was stupendously successful. I hope there isn’t a lesson in that.