There once was a BBC journalist – a Canadian liberal who was also an academic and wrote for London’s The Observer newspaper – who one day decided to go into politics back home. His name was Michael Grant Ignatieff.
According to insiders at the time, he made the decision with the same level of judgement and concentration an ordinary man would apply in choosing what colour of tie to wear to work on a day. This casual attitude was a reflection of Canadian politics in general over decades – nobody really spoke about all the times Justin Trudeau’s mother had been to visit Fidel Castro in Cuba sans her husband Pierre because nobody really cared. When he did get into politics, Ignatieff led Canada’s Liberal Party to its worst-ever defeat in 2011. Shrug, didn’t work out – whatever.
The attitude appears to have resurfaced in Mark Carney’s election as Canadian Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister until the constitutionally-mandated general elections are held in October. Carney won 160,000-odd votes from party members in a country with a population of 40 million; his challenger just so happened to be his godson’s mother, Chrystia Freeland, who also once worked in London for a newspaper, and who was instrumental in collapsing Justin Trudeau’s premiership when she quit as his finance chick in December.
Freeland in accounts wasn’t universally popular: her dual role as censor and finance torturer in 2021’s Canadian Trucker controversy prompted loathing, and she had tried to dismiss as “Russian disinformation” revelations that her grandfather Mykhailo Chomiak had partied heavily with Nazis. Regarding this hot suspicion of collaboration on the part of the accounts lady’s family, the Canadian parliament allocated considerable effort and resources in deciding how to respond, before settling on the idea of inviting an actual, living Nazi called Yaroslav Hunka to be celebrated there in 2023.
So-so
Like Ignatieff, Carney was so-so on the issue of politics in his home country. His CV is so distinguished it will make you puke: Goldman Sachs alumnus, former Governor of the Bank of Canada, former Governor of the Bank of England and until recently, Chair of Brookfield Asset Management (with approximately $900b assets under management). He’s married to a left-wing activist and proudly boasts that he’s “part of Greta Thunberg’s movement”.
But unlike Ignatieff, there was something he really wanted: Klaus Schwab’s job at the WEF. Unfortunately – for the time being – the old guy is still there, so until he snuffs it, or the volcano in which he chooses to live erupts, Carney will just have to settle on being Prime Minister of Canada.
It was difficult to watch Carney describing America as a “threat to his way of life” in his maiden address and not think about a fellow called Alan Johnson. Johnson was a former postman who became Labour’s Home Secretary until 2010 – and probably one of the finest Prime Ministers the United Kingdom never had.
Johnson was so decent, and so principled that his politics seemed immaterial: he was a man of tacit knowledge, far removed from the model of the PPE spreadsheet graduate UK institutions can’t stop chugging out and that has since swallowed most of the political profiling here. Uruguay had a guy like this once too – José Mujica – popular, a little eccentric, unwavering, and who once described FIFA’s former chief Sepp Blatter and his colleagues as “a gang of old sons of bitches”. Mujica posted his monthly pay cheques into the bank accounts of charities and owned a humble flower shop with his wife Lucia.
Loved and loathed
Carney is loved in the UK by professors, the Financial Times, regulators and civil servants. He is loathed by plumbers, farmers, ranchers, and mom ’n pop shops. This isn’t because during his term as Governor of the Bank of England he printed too much cash or couldn’t make his mind up about inflation. He isn’t even unpopular because of the jobs he took after he left, one of which was as UN Climate Envoy, where he charged around the world in a Gulfstream demanding that other people stop charging around the world in Gulfstreams.
His was the strongest endorsement of Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves – but even his support for a woman who stands accused of lying on her CV pales in comparison to what really winds people up.
That is: he’s not just a failure, but he’s a failure that keeps on getting promoted to fail elsewhere – and then again. He isn’t the first – there are literally hundreds of thousands of these specimens in British and European and South African politics today – but he’s clearly an alpha upward failure. And whilst nobody understands how or why this model exists, everyone’s reasonably convinced it’s not ending anytime soon.
These days, instead of electing men like Alan Johnson, it is as if we are now trying to teach a toileting baboon to fly, then not accepting it won’t fly – and not bothering in our unaccepting that it is still toileting.
Success
Success for Carney isn’t necessarily winning October’s Canadian election. Back in 2021, when the prospect of Donald Trump returning was jeered, Carney established the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) at COP26, which was supposed to channel billions of dollars into wind farms. Trump returned in November 2024, and by January, three of the largest banks had withdrawn from a GFANZ affiliate, leaving the alliance in urgent need of restructuring.
Carney, in his position as the WEF guy once Schwab has shuffled off – and he’s either resigned or been humiliated as Ignatieff was – would like to do something similar, but with everything. All governments, all people, all their pets, possessions.
Put every single piece of life and land on earth together in some vast scheme – then fail.
You should know the name Mark Carney as you do the name Martin Kingston. Like Kingston, Carney once advised the ANC. He too can’t stop talking about it.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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