Well gee. Just as everything was so darn serious — hurricanes, Iraq, oil prices and what have you — along comes comic relief, right in the nick of time, in the form of a great hoo-ha involving Canada’s greatest living political ego and its greatest journalistic one thrashing around in the muck.

It’s more fun even than watching Ben Mulroney on Canadian Idol. Poor Ben. He must be having ego problems, trying to be an entertainer in the shadow of a father who is the most entertaining ex-prime minister since John A. Macdonald.

At the risk of being one commentator too many having too much of a good time with this, let me nevertheless point out something that hasn’t been said and that throws a different light on it — “it,” in case you’ve spent the last couple of weeks on Mars, being author Peter C. Newman’s book based on taped conversations with Brian Mulroney, in which the dirty-talking former prime minister thrashes friend and foe alike, bemoans the ungrateful public’s refusal to recognize his greatness, and can even be jealous of the esteem in which “loser” Robert Stanfield was held by the public.

Since the CBC’s been locked out, we’re getting fed the Montreal morning show on French radio, and I’m intrigued by both the traffic reports and the politics. On the Newman book, the chit-chat was that this was the Liberal establishment pulling one of its patented dirty tricks — Newman being a part of the old Trudeau-Liberal intelligentsia. A Liberal plot, in other words.

I thought I’d check with the heavier thinkers to see how widespread this notion was, and sure enough: Wednesday’s editorial in Le Devoir stated that “the Liberal establishment, dominant in English Canada, never forgave Mulroney his policies and has waged a war without mercy against him,” asking “why does this book appear just when the image of the ex-prime minister was beginning to restore itself?”

The answer: “For the Liberal elite, it’s not without value to raise the spectre of Brian Mulroney right now. First, to bring to mind Conservative scandals at the moment when the Gomery report will put Liberal scandals onto the agenda. And to highlight that in their own way, the Conservatives of Stephen Harper are also upholders of a rapprochement with the United States and assymetrical federalism and that their election could lead to a dangerous backward step.”

Thus, shall we add paranoia to our little comedy?

There are two groups that are sweet on Brian — big business throughout Canada, and a core of soft nationalists in Quebec. It was, after all, Quebec that tipped the scales for free trade. English Canada was mainly against it. The separatism-tinted sentiment in Quebec was that doing business directly with the U.S. amounted to doing an end-run around English Canada. And there was the Meech Lake accord — an attempt, bungled to be sure, to reintegrate Quebec into the Constitution, and the main reason why “English Canada never forgave him,” in the mistrustful words of the Le Devoir editorialist.

In the end, though, this is no comedy, but rather a tragedy. Mulroney started out with tremendous support from all parts of the country and could have been a powerful unifier. On top of that, he had the advantage of being a perfect fit in a cultural sense. Both English Canadians and French-speaking Quebecois considered him one of their own, far more so than with Pierre Trudeau. With Mulroney, it was so seamless as to be invisible.

In the end, like John Diefenbaker before him or George W. Bush right now, he frittered away a huge endowment. He did this mainly with Meech Lake — an unnecessary move, since the separatist issue was dormant at the time. Still, he couldn’t resist “rolling the dice,” as he himself characterized it — or more specifically, trying to one-up Pierre Trudeau who had failed at the same thing.

The result was the shattering of the Progressive Conservative party into the Bloc Québécois and the Reform-Alliance-Conservative party. That’s the main legacy of Brian Mulroney. The rest — free trade, the GST, international wheeling and dealing, hobnobbing with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — is going to remain ambiguous in its meaning, especially as the neo-conservative philosophy on which it was based falters.

Meanwhile, the Liberal party has an indefinite hammerlock on power in Canada. That, too, is his legacy. Come to think of it, maybe it is a Liberal plot.