A former prime minister’s foul mouth.

Canada

Brian Mulroney is being publicly humiliated, and all of Canada is gleefully piling it on, said Andrew Cohen in The Ottawa Citizen. The architect of a hated tax, Mulroney was the most reviled prime minister of the century by the time he left office, in 1993. Since then, the former Progressive Conservative leader has longed to “rehabilitate his reputation.” Confident that history would eventually vindicate him, he enlisted author Peter Newman to write a frank biography. “I don’t want a puff piece,” Mulroney insisted. Newman interviewed Mulroney once a week and taped the conversations. But he also taped every other conversation he had with Mulroney over several years, including late-night bull sessions as the two became friends. The result was published last week, and is surely not what Mulroney envisioned. The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister shows the man spewing the “kind of crudeness, vainglory, egotism, indiscretion, pomposity, and hyperbole that have been the hallmark of his public life.”

Mulroney seems to spend most of his time nursing grievances, said Greg Weston in The Ottawa Sun. In the tape transcripts, he slams friends and rivals alike. He calls Liberals “Nazis,” his predecessor Pierre Trudeau an “a--hole,” and his successor, Kim Campbell, an incompetent who spent more time dallying with her boyfriend than campaigning for the party. Montrealers were scorned for their “f----ing” ingratitude, and the press for being “a bunch of unprincipled, corrupt failures.” Of course, the most telling quote is about himself: “You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did.”

It’s almost a caricature, said Jeffrey Simpson in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Mulroney comes across as “impossibly vain” and “petty,” not to mention “self-justifying in the extreme.” The picture is of “an almost Lear-like figure” who lives “in a private world of comforting truths, desperately explaining why he, and he alone, had the answers.” One can only hope that Mulroney also showed warmth, humor, or self-deprecation and that Newman simply chose to cut those passages.

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The whole book is meant to be a hatchet job, said David Warren, also in The Ottawa Citizen. Newman is a “shameless literary thug” who deserves only “contempt.” I was no great fan of Mulroney while he was in office, but I found him to be fundamentally honest. With “his sometimes hokey beliefs, and real loyalties, and his fine tactical mind,” he was a far better leader than those who came before and after. Even this attempt to smear him with his own words can’t really harm him. Most of the nasty criticisms he makes “are essentially just”—certainly his comments about the ineptitude of both Trudeau and Campbell have merit.

Montreal Gazette