by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s note: Michael Ignatieff and I were classmates at Harvard University. We were in the same “track” together, Modern European History. Each week for a year (1969-1970) we gathered for the colloquium which enabled H. Stuart Hughes, chairman of the History Department, to scrutinize us and decide who would advance to the Ph.D. program and who would be given the terminal Master’s Degree. Our class consisted of just a dozen students, or less. We came to know each other very well… He smoked gold tipped Sobranie, the Russian word for “‘sovereign” (current price $55 for 200)… his cigarette always a prop in his presentation.
Count Michael.
If there were any justice in the world, Michael Georgevitch Ignatieff would be waking up this morning on his wide acres near Smolensk as Count Michael, his paternal grandfather Count Pavel Ignatieff, the Russian Minister of Education during the First World War, grandson of Princess Natasha Mestchersky. But in 1917, the acres, the grand estates and country houses, the privileges and baubles from the Tsar, even the Tsar himself were all swept away… still, you will never understand Michael Ignatieff if you do not understand that he is a Russian aristocrat to his very fingers…. and that he longs for a world that was once his… a world long ago and far away from Canada. It’s all there in his 1987 book “The Russian Album”, which that year won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.
Born May 12, 1947
Ignatieff was born in Toronto, elder son of Russian-born Canadian diplomat (Count) George Ignatieff and his Canadian-born wife, Jessie Alison (nee Grant). His childhood was peripatetic as his father moved up the diplomatic ranks, ultimately becoming chief of staff to Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Michael Ignatieff got used to being around important people and their privileged lives. He became adept at the great game of moving up, by pleasing the influential, being in the right place at the right time, and always considering which move to make and when to make it. Every glittering prize in the world was available if you knew how to get it… and Michael Ignatieff was eager to learn…
He studied history at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College (B.A., 1969) where Bob Rae was his debating partner and fourth-year roommate. (Rae went on to become Ontario’s 21st premier 1990-1995 and one of the few Liberals to survive the debacle under Ignatieff.)
Restless, always in motion.
Ignatieff moved on again…. this time to Oxford University where he studied with celebrated liberal philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin about whom he would later write. Then Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he earned his PhD in 1976. Then the University of British Columbia (assistant professor from 1976 to 1978)…. then senior research fellow at King’s College, Cambridge until 1984. He then moved to London where he began to focus on his career as writer and journalist.
It was impressive, it was distinguished, it was rootless… and it was certainly not the standard career path of a politician who needed to understand and connect with real people and their everyday concerns. Michael Ignatieff’s career was becoming as recherche as his cigarettes… rare, exquisite, far-fetched. This would have been fine… except he hankered after political office and political power… and the plaudits and esteem which only come when one is the demonstrated “People’s Choice”. But could he get there by writing himself into power… without submitting himself to the messy business of politics? Could he reach the top of the greasy pole (as British statesman Benjamin Disraeli called it) by being wafted there and without a drop of grease on his refined, fastidious person?
That was Michael Ignatieff’s most astonishing idea of all…
Was there a precedent in the politics of Canada, Britain, or the United States of a man who went for the highest of offices without learning the craft of politics and the messy business of working with people from the grassroots up? In due course, perhaps Ignatief arrived at Woodrow Wilson, as prolific a writer and academic as Ignatieff himself, professor and then President of Princeton University.
But even Woodrow Wilson had served as elected Governor of New Jersey (1911-1913). Though Wilson’s was a troubled presidency, still it was the closest precedent to hand. Michael Ignatieff meant to improve upon it… becoming Prime Minister of Canada without administrative, executive or foreign policy experience, having been elected just twice as a Member of Parliament… and without the most important thing of all: the proven ability to arouse, enthuse, lead the people.
That he should believe it is perfectly understandable; (people can after all persuade themselves about anything). That he got the leaders of the greatest of Canadian political parties to believe it is… remarkable, incredible, mad.
Yet that is precisely what happened when in 2004 three Liberal organizers, former Liberal candidate Alfred Apps, Ian Davey (son of Senator Keith Davey) and lawyer Daniel Brock traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts (where Ignatieff held a professorship at Harvard) and persuaded him to move back to Canada and consider a bid for the Liberal leadership (should Paul Martin retire) and then Prime Minister. The tailors had done their work and now the Emperor with no clothes was ready for his unique, historic journey. Paul Martin did iretire the Liberal Party leadership after the Liberal government was defeated in the January 2006 federal election… and the poobahs of the defeated party were persuaded that no experience was the best experience… that no leadership skills were the best skills to lead… and that a man who so loved and venerated Canada that he sought every opportunity to leave her… that this was the best man in the nation to be Prime Minister of a great people.
Oh! Ignatieff!
But if the leaders of the Liberal Party (who ultimately anointed Ignatieff as their unproven paladin) believed Count Michael’s mythology, the people of Canada did not. They called it as they saw it, and they knew, like the unnamed boy in the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, the emperor had no clothes, or anything else except the desire to start at the top, accepting obeisance. It was one of the most fatuous of political ideas ever perpetrated. And handed unprecedented victory to Conservative Stephen Harper. And unprecedented, abject defeat to the Liberals who forgot, with Ignatieff, the very heart of their principles: that governments are of the people, by the people, for the people… and of leaders who work a lifetime to understand those people and serve them.
As for Michael Ignatieff, who presided over the Liberal’s greatest, unprecedented defeat? He hinted he could be persuaded, if properly asked, to stay on as leader. No takers, there. And then he went before the nation and petulantly lambasted his opponents for questioning his attachment to Canada and his patriotism, still not understanding the rambunctious game of politics, a blood sport, not the coronation he expected. It was “their” fault Canadians were deprived of such a man as he. No doubt Count Michael will make his exhaustive case in his next book, which will be written anywhere else than the Canada he loves so much…
About the Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Dr. Lant is also the author of 18 best-selling business books.
Republished with author’s permission by Randy Ottmann TrafficMaxNow.com.
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