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Are they good friends or aren't they? According to most standards of college roommate friendship they can't possibly be.

Liberal leadership alpha dogs Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff have a famed friendship that goes back 42 years and includes a stint as roommates while they were both studying at the University of Toronto.

Yet even then their relationship consisted of so much intellectual sparring it had a “you're-such-an-ass” tension to it, according to Toronto Life columnist Philip Preville, who recently wrote that the two men and their friendship have morphed into one heavy-duty gossip item: “IggyBob.”

The friendship reportedly barely survived the Liberal leadership contest in 2006, when Mr. Ignatieff became the front-runner who couldn't pull it off, and both were considered presumptuous pretenders to the Liberal throne.

Back then Mr. Rae, the former NDP Ontario premier, was a recent convert to the Liberal Party with some heavy political baggage, and Mr. Ignatieff was a globe-trotting intellectual who had been out of the country for years and had supported the war in Iraq.

Now, both are Liberal MPs in their 60s with legions of admirers. And they are back at it, this time vying for Stéphane Dion's tarnished crown.

“I fear it could get ugly,” one man who's a friend of both told me.

Hello, it already is ugly. The two men had a well-publicized spat last weekend when Mr. Rae walked out of the party's all-candidates' forum claiming Mr. Ignatieff was keeping it closed to the public. And that's just the start of it.

Apparently, the last time around, supporters of each were messing with the other's Wikipedia profiles, and private blasts from the past became campaign currency, including mention of a time of emotional instability in Mr. Rae's early postgrad life when he flopped on Mr. Ignatieff's couch for a few months, paralyzed about his future.

Several years ago, in U of T Magazine, the princely pair were musing about their friendship and Mr. Rae said, “That competitive thing is probably sublimated somewhere, but we've never let it get in the way of our friendship.”

Ha! That was then, this is now and how sad that what for many of us is a classic formative friendship has evolved for them into a national squabble.

My roommate in the second year of university was the first person I actually chose to live with in my life – until then, I lived with family members and was assigned a dorm roommate (decidedly not my type) in first year.

We were the two funniest students in the dorm, and when we moved out together the betting was that we were too competitive to stay friends. “It'll never last,” one floormate sniffed.

Well, our friendship has endured almost as long as IggyBob's but apparently in a lot better shape. Back then, as we set up house in a condemnably grimy apartment, she had my back and saw me through that first crucial phase of growing up, from dependent family member to full-blown adult.

She's remained a cross between a best friend and a sister, and she still knows my secrets. We haven't lived in the same city for 20 years, but we call each other several times a week. Although, it's lucky we went into different professional fields because I wouldn't want to compete against her for an on-sale cashmere sweater, let alone the leadership of a major political party.

In contrast, there's something sadly reductive about the IggyBob rivalry. It's as if these two good men almost cancel each other out. (They did last time as Mr. Dion squeaked up the middle.) Both are saying, “I deserve to be prime minister.” “No, I do.” “Mine.” “No, it's mine.” And yet still they maintain that they are friends.

Some have called it a Greek tragedy, others a farce. But politics not only makes strange bedfellows, it creates passionate “frenemies” – so-called friends who go after the same prize and can barely restrain their hostility, all the while mouthing pleasantries. The truth is that if either man wins the leadership, he will desperately need the other to help rebuild the party.

For years they have spurred each other on as each man's considerable public achievements loomed large in the other's mind. Mr. Ignatieff once said of Mr. Rae, “His life is the road I didn't take.” But now their roads have converged into one – and it's a rocky one.

One thing my former university roommate and I know for sure is that we'll still be close as little old ladies, acerbically reviewing our lives and how they unfolded – kids, husbands, careers, and the whole damn lot, profoundly grateful that we remained each other's sounding board for life.

Bob Rae and his former roommate Michael Ignatieff, never that confessional to begin with (“Bob is not a confessional guy,” Mr. Ignatieff once said), at this point probably can't imagine coming together as affectionate friends again in their old age.

Right now neither will be happy until he's conquered the other. Maybe the real thing that has lasted this long is not friendship at all, but the spark of animus they ignited in each other.