So poor, misunderstood Brian Mulroney is “devastated” and “hurt” because his good friend, best-selling author Peter C. Newman, “betrayed” him. Newman’s betrayal? He assumed Mulroney meant it when he gave Newman complete and total tape-recorded access to his innermost ravings — not to mention a warehouse full of his government’s minutes and memos — so he could write the definitive, “warts and all” account of Mulroney’s prime ministership.

Mulroney didn’t really intend him to do any such thing, of course. He expected Newman to deliver a sanitized version of The Life of Brian — in which Mulroney stars as the poor electrician’s boy from Baie Comeau who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps, vaulting over obstacles and villains to become the greatest prime minister Canada has ever known, better certainly than that bastard Pierre Trudeau, not to forget a primo world statesman and all-round fine fellow. The fall of the Berlin Wall? That was Brian’s doing. The invention of the Internet? Oh, sorry, that was Al Gore.

Mulroney assumed — on the reasonable basis of a career’s worth of deference from a lap-dog press corps in Ottawa — that Newman would know enough not to quote his profane and paranoid pontifications directly and, perhaps more importantly, that Newman would find a way to put Mulroney’s puffed up boasts (“Nobody has achievements like this, Peter. I can say that to you objectively. You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are noneâe¦”) and slimy personal attacks (Mulroney’s successor, Kim Campbell, lost the 1993 election because she was too busy “screwing around” with her Russian boyfriend) into Newman’s own well-chosen and supportive words.

Now Mulroney, through his mouthpiece, Luc Lavoie, is trying to make it sound as if the 98 recorded, transcribed interviews Mulroney had with Newman over the years were just friendly, not-for-publication chats between best buddies. “For a man like this,” Lavoie said of Newman, “to tape him without his knowledge and use it this way is nothing short of betrayal.”

At least Mulroney isn’t claiming he never met Newman, which is what he said about me after I wrote a magazine profile of him back the late seventies. The Brian Mulroney who is front and centre in Newman’s new book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, is most definitely the man I remember from the afternoon and evening I spent listening to him rant. “If Joe Clark wins the (upcoming) election, I’ll eat this plate,” he told me over dinner. I dutifully wrote it down in my notebook while Mulroney watched me. We were most definitely on the record. A few minutes later, he was boasting that René Lévesque’s Parti Quebecois “wouldn’t have won [the 1976 provincial] election if I was the leader” of the Tories.

After he’d had the chance to think about what he’d said, Mulroney tried to convince me not to publish the story. When it appeared in the Financial Post Magazine, in fact, he claimed he’d never even met me. (The reality was that it had taken me three months to get my audience with Mulroney; he’d even asked his good friend, Peter Newman, then the editor of Maclean’s, to vet me before he agreed to sit down with me!) Luckily for me, I had a receipt with Mulroney’s name on it to show for my time with himâe¦

I only discovered later that the vain, profane, paranoid Mulroney I met that day was well known among the press gallery in Ottawa. But no one — until Newman — has ever written about that Mulroney.

Which makes it all the more ironic that Mulroney spews a good deal of venom in Newman’s book attacking the Ottawa press gallery for failing to appreciate his greatness. He calls them a “phony bunch of bastards,” which clearly is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The truth is that, for most of his career, the national press gave Mulroney a free pass. Even after he left office, Mulroney has enjoyed the benefits of a quiescent press. Consider just one recent example: Mulroney has never been pressed to account for the $300,000 he accepted from Karl Heinz Schreiber , the German businessman caught up in the Airbus scandal, soon after he returned to the private sector, ostensibly to lobby on behalf of another Schreiber enterprise. The Globe and Mail, which — to its credit — broke the original story a few years ago, seemed almost embarrassed by it, and has never done any serious follow up. Neither did any other mainstream media outlet.

And this week, of course, The Globe and Mail quickly weighed in with an apologetic, puzzled editorial asking, Why Hate Mulroney So?

“Brian Mulroney deserves much better,” wrote the Globe.

With enemies like that, who needs friends?

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel and nine books of non-fiction, including the best-selling Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair...