Whatever else Michael Ignatieff might miss about England, I can't think it's the press. A long-time former member of their Grub Street, Ig was the subject yesterday of a two-page full-colour spread in The Observer (one of his former employers). The interview was full to brimming with all sorts of the first-person, clever-clever that passes for insight thereabouts. Using this shop-worn technique, the writer wonders what it must be like to be Michael Ignatieff given that he's surrendered thinking for politics, London for Ottawa, life for, well, not life.
His tone ... is slow, excessively careful and completely without irony, none of which would be surprising were he a career politician. Since when did irony and politics go? But Ignatieff used to be a writer. Listening to him now, it's as if he's been sedated, or body-snatched, or something. He's like a jazz man who's lost his sense of rhythm.
... His London schedule, like his meeting earlier this year with Barack Obama, is, I guess, a sign of how seriously politicians outside Canada now take him and he returns the favour. I ask how he found Cameron. "He's serious. He's got real answers to real questions. He knows what he believes, and he is intensely political in the best sense of the word. I thought he was personally charming. It was fun!"
Fun! But Ignatieff used to be a writer, a man who could say whatever he liked, and now he is a politician, and is able to say precisely nothing unless it comes straight from the script. How can that be fun?
Let me give that one a go. For one thing, it's gotta be more fun than having to read tripe like that. Oh, and speaking of straight-from-the-script, how about the following which, without attribution, is pretty much lifted from the Gopnik profile in The New Yorker.
In Canada, feelings about Ignatieff can be split roughly in two. There are those who complain that it is a sign only of the country's feebleness and insecurity that it is seriously considering an intellectual who has spent a lifetime abroad as its future leader; and there are those who boast that it is a sign of its sophistication, maturity and wisdom that it is seriously considering an intellectual who has spent a lifetime abroad as its future leader.
And there we thought he came back just to lord it over us near to hand, when all that time Ig was simply pining for a little halfway decent journalism.
