An Unholy Marriage

This book was sprung on the media in September with no advance notice and a thoroughly misleading title suggesting a comparison with the infamous White House tapes that helped to bring down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. The media gulped the bait, as they always do when deadlines press and scoops are promised, and the result was a tsunami of publicity probably unprecedented in Canadian lit­ erary history. The Globe and Mail splashed a few juicy quotes all over its front page, Maclean’s ran extracts, radio stations played recordings—thoughtfully provided by the publisher—of Brian Mulroney when he was prime minister and, for a few days the author, Peter Newman, was racing from TV to radio interview and back again.

He even had a special T-shirt, which he displayed to the cameras: “He Bugs Us Still,” a play on the phrase made popular by one of his former wives, the late Christina McCall Newman, and her second husband, Stephen...