The slogan that could doom Mark Carney

Mark Carney has won the Liberal party leadership contest by an enormous margin. He will soon be the prime minister of Canada. It’s a moment of triumph for the former governor of the Bank of England, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, a senior banker at Goldman Sachs based in the United States, Japan and Britain, for a former shapeshifting personage of the United Nations, for a Davos regular: for one of the most ambitious, globally ambitious, guys around. It’s a repudiation of the idea that a citizen of nowhere financier type educated at Harvard and Oxford could never rise to the top in our populist age.

But things are not all roses for Carney. He puts me in mind of Michael Ignatieff, who was Liberal leader before 2011 and Justin Trudeau. Like Carney, Ignatieff was a professorial elitist who hit the heights abroad.