It's a quicksand world of shifting loyalties, betrayal, revenge and sometimes tawdry theatre that Michael Ignatieff has discovered in 18 months of political life – a world of vituperative attacks that is more often coloured by failure than by success.
“The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people, whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid,” the onetime Harvard political scientist and now deputy leader of the federal Liberal Party tells an American audience in this The New York Times Magazine this Sunday.
“The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making.”
It's a rare exercise in self-scrutiny and an awakening awareness of living in the world of politics by a senior Canadian politician.
In the article he declares flat out that he was wrong to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led military coalition, a position that brought widespread criticism from the U.S. academic community and travelled with him – like the black cloud over the head of Al Capp's legendary cartoon character Joe Btfsplk – when he left Harvard and returned to Canada to run for Parliament in Toronto's Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding for a party that opposed the invasion.
Asked in an interview this week if his comments about betrayal and loyalty were references to Bob Rae, who for years was his closest friend until they fell out over their respective campaigns for last year's Liberal Party leadership, Mr. Ignatieff jokingly replied: “I wrote it for no other purpose. The only thing.”
Then he said, seriously: “I really, genuinely, don't think that – looking you in the eye – I don't think that was the deal. You mustn't read those passages as if I'm suppressing some volcanic set of rages at named individuals.
“You have to see the piece [The New York Times article] in the right frame – what's different about the judgments you make in the safety of academic life from the judgments you make in politics.
“You have to remember I spent five years getting up every Tuesday and Thursday morning, teaching political science to bright people, and what's funny about it, looking back on it, is that I would teach it totally differently now. That's what I think the piece is saying.”
If there is ambiguity to his meaning about loyalty and betrayal, there is none in another passage of the article where he suggests that he has had to learn not to take political attacks personally because to do so would display vulnerability and because so many of the attacks are theatrical.
“The pretend aspects are very hard to grasp because some of those attacks appear so personal. But it's a game and you have to learn that,” he said in the interview.
He writes in his article: “This ... hypocrisy of public life is not available in private life. There we play for keeps. But among friends and family, we also cut one another some slack. We fill in one another's sentences. What we mean matters more than what we say.
“No such mercies occur in politics. In public life language is a weapon of war. … All that matters is what you said, not what you meant. The political realm is a world of lunatic literalism. The slightest crack in your armour – between what you meant and what you said – can be pried open and the knife driven home.”
Mr. Ignatieff felt the knife last summer, at the outset of the Liberal leadership campaign, as the news media, opposition politicians and some of Mr. Ignatieff's fellow Liberals jabbed repeatedly at his jugular over clumsily worded comments he made about the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.
