Michael Ignatieff - Volte Face?

Well, they're off! The next Liberal Leadership Race has begun.

Rae of Bob fired his opening salvo last week at the Ontario Caucus meeting where he changed his mind about allowing the media access to the closed door meetings at the last minute. For that party favour, he got the indulgence of the press to sling mud at Micheal Ignatieff, who suggested that the meeting was supposed to be like a meeting of "family" so they could privately discuss party concerns and issues. Seemed reasonable. He probably doesn't broadcast his call's to his wife either.

Yesterday Rae of Bob formally launched himself before Parliament opened - no doubt to dilute the massive press the Conservatives received from the Throne Speech. Basically, he is the only Liberal leadership candidate with the experience of leading a government during a recession (Premier of Ontario in October 1990 to July 1995). Umm. Not so fast Bob. Given that you will have to win seats back in Ontario and Quebec - do you have the undying devotion of the electorate?

Then today there was this "Where I Stand" piece in the National Post - honestly, I can't make head nor tail of it. Perhaps these gobbledy bits are better left as speeches?

But what about Iggy?

What do we know about him? Precious little. Here is Mike Janke's recent exploration of the man. Methinks there are worms beneath this stone best left undisturbed.

I have collected some background from a G&M profile in August 2006 by intrepid reporter Mike Valpy to provide some measure of the man, described as a genius by many Liberals.

There are some jarring vignette's.

Like when his younger brother Andrew recalled how Micheal explained how they could interact when he arrived to join Micheal at Upper Canada College in 1962.

"We went for a walk, and he said, 'I want to make one thing absolutely clear to you. When we're at Aunt Helen's house or Aunt Charity's house [Charity Grant, their mother's sister], you can say whatever you want to me. But if you ever see me on the school grounds, you're not to talk to me. You're not to recognize that I'm your brother. You don't exist as far as I'm concerned. Do I make myself clear?'"

Or when he volunteered to be a neutral observer after racial riots in a maximum security prison in Walpole MA near Harvard where he was taking his M.A in History.

"I'd had a sheltered Canadian middle-class life. I think my whole life I've been fascinated by this sense that the world is divided into zones of safety and zones of danger and violence, and the distance between the two is very small.

"In prisons, the violence is what maintains the social order. You can't think of these zones of safety as being happy, consensual, liberal. They're maintained with this, with violence."

The Walpole ordeal was a nightmarish experience for him, and back in the hallowed halls of Harvard, he was finding life brutal. He had come from provincial University of Toronto where he had been at the top of his class and was now discovering that everyone he met at America's pre-eminent institution of higher learning was smarter than he was.

Ignatieff was not well accepted at Harvard. A friend of the time believes he was betrayed by his aristocratic background. However perhaps it was good fortune as he soon landed a job teaching history at UBC and before school started, he took a break to visit his family's villa in France. En route he stopped in London and encountered Susan Barrowclough:

"a beautiful, vivacious film historian and rising young British intellectual who had studied under Federico Fellini — and sang Verdi off-key. Cupid's arrow whacked them both."

After a year of teaching, the couple found themselves back in London under a Cambridge fellowship. They found the period intellectually challenging. As Valpy recounts:

".... Michael's intelligence and knowledge, his supple political mind, his astonishing facility to write analytical prose and his rigorous discipline as an author. (He wrote two books in this period: Wealth and Virtue, on Scotland during the Enlightenment, and The Needs of Strange rs, on the philosophical conflict between individualism and communitarianism.)"

Yet the Thatcher Revolution of the time seems to have been a seminal moment. One in which Ignatieff realized that he was not a Socialist - he was a liberal.

"Mr. Ignatieff wrote an article for the December, 1984, issue of New Statesman stating that the coal miners were indeed acting against the national interest. But what his article fomented was a furor around its author. He was accused of betraying the cause. People severed friendships with him."

His writing career began - and his family life unraveled. In August 1984 at a rare family gathering where his mother's Alzheimer's condition was revealed, he denounced his father emotional detachment with wounding accusations. Other rifts developed.

"Writing about family," he says in our interview, "it's all about creating the ground under your own feet. It's kind of a process of self-invention, so that you're standing with your feet planted, you know who the hell you are, you know where the hell you came from, you know where the hell you're going."

Through the family stories he says, he gives himself away — whether they are biographical, fictional or some thicket of both fact and fiction. His relationship with George pervades much of what he writes, something he once called "working through stuff with my father."

By the summer of 1989, George Ignatieff - Micheal's father - was dead.

A man feels alone when his father dies, he says, "but I don't feel bereft, although I would give a great deal to spend another second in his company." His father, he says, taught him "ultimate loyalties — that's what fathers can do."

His brother, Andrew believed that when their father died, his own resentment toward Micheal vanished.

"I have reworked our relationship again and again. Michael floats above daily interaction and he thinks that force of will and force of intellect can override psychological and emotional factors. He's had to learn they can't. The thing that saves my relationship with him is that we can meet on an emotional level. His intellectual life is not real to me."

By 1992, their mother too has died - nursed to the end by Andrew. Micheal writes a semi-autobiographical fiction about his mother, her illness and his family. As a footnote a character that closely resembles him has an affair and is ordered out of their home by his wife.

Shortly afterward, a British newspaper gossip columnist trumpeted that Michael Ignatieff — "the patron saint of the New Man" — had left his wife for another woman.

In 1999, Michael Ignatieff married Suzanna Zsohar.

Ms. Zsohar came into Mr. Ignatieff's life at the right moment. On the crest of hard work, discipline and remarkable talent, he had travelled an awesome distance.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing violent eruptions of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans and elsewhere propelled him on to the global stage as an eloquent and forceful proponent of the obligations of liberal democracies to intervene in failed states to protect their inhabitants.

In television documentaries and books — Blood and Belonging, Guardians of Chaos, The Warrior's Honour, Virtual War, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, The Trial of Freedom and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror — he explored the new violence of ethnicity and terror and the failure of traditional multilateral means to contain them.

The Observer gave him a weekly column. He was invited to give lectures at leading U.S. and Canadian universities and offered visiting professorships at the London School of Economics and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Blood and Belonging in 1993 won the $50,000 Lionel Gelber Prize for foreign-policy writing, beating out Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy.

He became a celebrity.

And then, seemingly as quickly as it began the media turned.

"critics called him pompous, tedious, long-winded, a bore — and worse, "a Canadian bore. One paper kept referring to him as "Big Ig."

"And so, two years later, after he and Ms. Zsohar married, Mr. Ignatieff was ready to make another radical change. He junked the fading media career; he junked the British, and he came back across the pond, having resurrected himself as an academic."

"A quarter-century after leaving Harvard convinced that it was overrated, pompous and arrogant, he was back — as director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy, an academic think tank tucked beneath the umbrella of Harvard's prestigious Kennedy School of Government."

"He turned the Carr into a dynamic intellectual salon, crackling with scholarly electricity in all directions — looking at human rights in the context of a global responsibility to protect, philosophically re-examining the social contract, investigating the failure of civil society in places such as the Balkans, analyzing how the strong use power on behalf of the weak."

And then in early 2003, he did something that not only shocked his colleagues but brought down on his head the condemnation of the entire U.S. left. In a Sunday magazine essay in The New York Times, he declared his support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It was 1984 all over again.

"He eloquently defended himself, writing in The Guardian, for example: "Now that combat has commenced, those, like me, who support the war need to be honest enough to address some painful questions. Who wants to live in a world where there are no stable rules for the use of force by states? Not me. Who wants to live in a world ruled by the military power of the strong? Not me. How will we oblige American military hegemony to pay 'decent respect to the opinions of mankind'? I don't know."

"To support the war entails a commitment to rebuild that order on new foundations. To support the war entails other discomforts as well. It means remaining distinct from the company you keep, supporting a swift and decisive victory, while maintaining your distance from the hawks, the triumphalists, the bellowing commentators who mistake machismo for maturity."

Then, in 2005, he again did something shocking — he suddenly resigned from the Carr to return to Canada.

Denis Smith, emeritus professor of political science at University of Western Ontario, puts it another way.

"His writings would be of no public significance, if he had continued his academic and literary career in Canada or abroad," Prof. Smith writes in his new book, Ignatieff's World: A Liberal Leader for the Twenty-first Century, to be published next month.

"But once he became a candidate for the Liberal leadership and a potential prime minister, what he has said about world affairs over two decades becomes relevant to members of the Liberal Party and to the Canadian electorate."

The observer wants to be a player.

On the night of Jan. 23, 2006 Michael Ignatieff — after a slightly dodgy acquisition of the nomination in Etobicoke-Lakeshore (all possible opponents were declared ineligible) — was elected to Parliament.

We will find out more about him soon - just as we did about M. Stephane DION - as I predict he will be the next Liberal Leader. My only question is what shall be the next glorious about-face?