Gone but not forgotten
They met in 1961 as young men on the make. Brian Mulroney, the son of an electrician, was studying law and was dead serious about politics. Peter Newman was a journalist who had fled Europe as a child with his Jewish parents, one step ahead of the Nazis. Fifteen years later, when Mr Mulroney was running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada and confident that he was very soon going to be prime minister, they met again.
Mr Mulroney joked that he would make Newman ambassador to Austria. Newman countered that what he really wanted was to write an insider's book on Mr Mulroney as prime minister. They struck a deal. The future Canadian leader promised Newman unlimited interview time plus access to his diary and files - as long as the book was published after his term as prime minister had ended.
Mr Mulroney did become prime minister, serving from 1984 to 1993. Through those years, Newman had his tape recorder running. Last week, his explosive book landed in bookstores across the country. It is not quite the tome either Newman had planned or Mr Mulroney had hoped for.
In the end, Mr Mulroney denied Newman access to his diary and other papers. So Newman based his book on the tapes. It delivers to readers fly-on-the-wall access to the former prime minister during his most vulgar, vain and vindictive moments. He called former prime minister Pierre Trudeau a 'coward'. He believed that he was surrounded by liars, that most reporters were spiteful and stupid, and that the civil service was riddled with incompetents.
He despised Ottawa: 'There's something in the air here that transforms people from supplicants to sinners overnight,' he said. And he told Newman that history would judge him one of Canada's greatest prime ministers.
In between his rants to Newman, he ran the country with a volatile coalition of right wingers and cronies from his native province of Quebec. The scandals they mired themselves in were unending. At one point, Newman says the police were 'conducting 22 separate investigations into wrongdoing by members of the Mulroney administration'. Cabinet ministers were fired, sentenced to prison terms or resigned in disgrace.
To be fair, Mr Mulroney did appoint more women to the courts and his cabinet, he had the courage to introduce a goods and services tax, and showed real leadership on a range of environmental issues. But Canadians came to see him as a braggart and a blowhard. He once asked Newman why people hated him so much. 'It's simple: nobody believes a word you say,' Newman replied. This book is a bracing reminder of why.
