I’m curious about one of Stephen Harper’s themes throughout the Bernier-Couillard affair, even now, after the minister has resigned: A “girlfriend” is nobody’s business and the opposition leaders are “quite a group of gossipy old busybodies.” He sounds like an old busybody from Avonlea himself. What does he think he’s achieving?

Is he channelling his inner Trudeau, the voice that says government has no place in the nation’s bedrooms, even when a cabinet minister is in there too? Is he out to divert attention from the fact that he’s a hyperactive busybody, managing everything? Is it a Tourette’s-like outburst of libertarianism? But he’s no libertarian, he’s a neo-con, combining moral conservatism with free market economics.

Were they all just so unhinged by that sight of “cleavage” at the swearing-in that they had to get a grip: Wow, did you see who’s with Max? Eyes down, everybody, look away. Is it an attack on the left-wing 1960s notion that the personal is the political — Stephen Harper trying to reassert some principles from his past, before he came to power and started to dilute them? We all have to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror each morning. Hey, now I’m starting to blend the personal with the political.

Well, no surprise. The private and political do intermingle in politics.

People rarely even try to separate them. Take as an example the fraught, intimate area of weight and obesity. It’s hard to find anything people feel more fragile and private about. Yet Mr. Harper dropped a few pounds recently and now wife, Laureen, gives interviews on how he did it. On Wednesday, CTV News, as part of the Couillard story, showed a European leader greeting him with, “You’ve lost some weight, you’re looking more elegant.” The PM visibly kvelled.

Or take the question of whether a leader is personally vile, a monster, as a former Obama adviser called Hillary Clinton. Of course that matters politically. Many of us have known people we feel are monstrous, and we may sympathize with what made them that way. But we want to be careful what they have power over. Senator Clinton has some good policies, but being a leader involves responding to the unforeseen, like 9/11. Do you want a person who’s somehow monstrous, however understandably, in that role? Her rival, Senator Barack Obama, has pretty conventional views but no one calls him a monster. I’d sleep easier with him in that office than her, though their views barely differ.

It’s all personal and political, even if everyone makes the links their own way. Otherwise, what’s with the stress on wives and families? Then why did Stephen Harper insist that “girlfriends” are out of bounds? Because, I’d argue, it was Julie Couillard, in that dress, with the much-noted cleavage, at the swearing-in, and it’s sex he was talking about, not girlfriends.

It wasn’t even cleavage. Cleavage is a term from the 1950s or the TV series set back then, Mad Men. She didn’t show cleavage at the ceremony, she showed breasts. Cleavage used to hint at breasts, which couldn’t be shown. Now they are. Breasts are the new cleavage and nipples are the new breasts. This is how it is with sex, always moving ahead, uncontrollable. When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was taken to see the Grand Canyon in 1959, his translator asked what it made him think of.

“It makes me think of sex,” he said. “Everything makes me think of sex.”

It gets in the way, it goes its own way. I choose to think this is what Stephen Harper had in mind. We can try to connect anything personal to politics — except sex. It’s too sui generis.

I feel oddly sympathetic to Stephen Harper on this aspect of this issue. But, then, the most interesting, unexpected thing about the Prime Minister — check that: the only surprising thing about him — is his spouse, Laureen.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.