The Canadian Ed Miliband

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.