Foreword by Lawrence Martin

Extracts from the foreword by Lawrence Martin
(Globe and Mail columnist and author of ten books)

... The astonishing story of the crash of conservatism and its rebirth is the subject of Bob Plamondon’s Full Circle. The author comes at it with a unique perspective. Party insiders sometimes do such books. Academics sometimes do them and often it is journalists who take up the challenge. Plamondon provides the advantage of bringing all three perspectives to the table. He has taught at several universities, he was a party insider, having run once for the Tories and worked for the party in elections and leadership conventions. In researching the book he has done the journalists’ labour, interviewing more than 30 key figures in the drama.

... His voyage through the last two decades brings new twists and astute analysis to the narrative. Because the post-Mulroney conservative factions could never manage to pose a legitimate threat at winning power, they were hardly the subject of a profusion of books and studies. Plamondon’s is the first to chart the fall and rise with such thoroughness.

... Having created the Reform Party, Preston Manning was soon to learn that as a right-leaning Alberta-based rump, he could not win on the national level. He was a historian of sorts. History, as Plamondon amply records, demonstrated that the Conservatives only won when they built coalitions to broaden their tent. Manning had narrowed it.

...The Orchard affair for the first time gets a full hearing in this book. As Plamondon points out, leadership conventions have often been marked by secret plots and secret deals. The pact between MacKay and the left-wing Tory David Orchard took on a more sinister life than the others. For the future of conservatism, it was good that it did.

... Full Circle details the story of how the surprisingly quick merger was conceived and executed. What effective authors of history do is get underneath the running accounts of journalism to provide new information, insights and meaningful context. Plamondon’s account reveals how an obscure event, the Perth-Middlesex by-election in May of 2003, changed Stephen Harper: it reveals special moments, such as the fateful one when MacKay came across Harper in the Commons corridor and uttered the words, “You and I have to talk:” It shows how Belinda Stronach, credited in the media as a significant player in the merger, was in fact of little significance: How Brian Mulroney was pulling the strings telling everyone how Jean Chretien had been going to bed every night saying “Merci beaucoup Preston Manning:”