Toby Young Toby Young

The Canadian Ed Miliband

Michael Ignatieff showed a political cack-handedness that was at odds with his reputation as a brilliant intellectual

I’ve been reading Fire and Ashes, Michael Ignatieff’s account of his disastrous foray into politics, in an attempt to understand where it all went wrong for Ed Miliband. In combination with the election postmortems and interviews with the people in Miliband’s inner circle, it’s extremely illuminating.

For those unfamiliar with his story, Ignatieff is a left-wing Harvard professor who in 2004 received a surprise visit by three ‘men in black’ — high-ups in the Liberal party of Canada who sounded him out about making a run for the leadership. Beyond working on Pierre Trudeau’s campaign as a student in 1968, Ignatieff was a political virgin, but the three fixers thought that might be an asset because he wasn’t tainted by the party’s infighting or financial scandals. Ignatieff said yes and, after being elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 2006, became the leader of the opposition two years later.

He was a disaster. In the 2011 general election his party lost 43 of its 77 seats, finishing in third place, while Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won an overall majority. It was the worst result the Liberals had ever recorded and Ignatieff was the first Canadian leader of the opposition to lose his seat since 1878.

Some of his unpopularity was due to positions he’d taken before entering politics, such as supporting the Iraq war, and his status as an ‘outsider’ was less of an advantage than the three fixers had imagined, enabling his opponents to brand him as a carpetbagger who was ‘just visiting’. But his failure was also due to a series of blunders he made after he’d been installed as leader — a cack-handedness that was at odds with his reputation as a brilliant intellectual. It’s in this respect that he most closely resembles Ed Miliband.

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